Chaim Potok Quotes

Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

Art is like a fart for the soul. Better out than in.

In a way, art is a great way to release your love, fantasy, and desires. It's like a fetish. It's a comfortable way of excising a lot of your conscience.

Spirituality now wanders from sex to drugs to art to revolution to violence--whatever seems to promise deliverance from the quotidian.

My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly - and worse - of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" - still the "darkness" is majestic.

I am weary of personal worrying, in love with the art of madness.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

Art, for example, becomes "art therapy." When patients make music, it becomes "music therapy." When the arts are used for "therapy" in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.

I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.

Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

Art is a wound turned into light.

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer.

As an artist you can use your own discomfort and neuroses and difficulties and at least transform them into something else. Without that you're just neurotic and uncomfortable.

I can't think of anything more rewarding than being able to express yourself to others through painting. Exercising the imagination, experimenting with talents, being creative; these things, to me, are truly the windows to your soul.

I tried to find a way out in many ways, but it all caught up with me. Once I realised I could sing and write songs, it was just so much easier to do than anything else!

Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art

Working in the arts, you see people who come from terrible circumstances and who, for whatever reason, have incredible talent. But of course, with that great talent comes some guilt because, if you come from circumstances that don't encourage it, it can be really confusing.

Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot.

Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.

In the past, I was definitely more apt to storing pain away and not worrying about it. But as I get older, it's really about figuring out how to process it, how to feel it, and then also how to use it in my art.

One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria.

Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.