Life & Wisdom Quote by Chaim Potok

"I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it"

Chaim Potok, Author

About this Quote

Writing, Potok insists, isn’t the glamorous act of summoning a world out of nothing; it’s the stubborn, often bruising labor of deciding what that world can afford to lose. The line lands because it flips the usual fantasy of inspiration. He doesn’t compare drafting to sculpting; he compares revising to sculpting, and drafting to quarrying. First you “create the piece of marble” - an intentionally clumsy image for a novelist, whose medium is supposed to be airy and infinite. Potok’s point is that a book begins as mass: too much backstory, too many scenes, language that reaches. Only after you’ve made that ungainly block can you begin the real art, the chipping away that reveals shape.

The subtext is both permission and warning. Permission: your first draft is allowed to be blunt, overgrown, even wrong; it’s raw material. Warning: the figure doesn’t appear by adding more marble. Revision demands subtraction, taste, and a willingness to kill sentences you love because they don’t serve the emerging form.

Context matters with Potok, a writer steeped in traditions where interpretation is disciplined argument - where you honor the text by wrestling with it. His novels often stage identity as something uncovered under pressure: inherited faith, modern desire, communal obligation. That’s the revision metaphor’s quiet emotional charge. You’re not just polishing prose; you’re excavating the self you accidentally wrote, then choosing whether you can live with what you’ve found.

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Topic	Writing
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About the Author

Chaim Potok (February 17, 1929 - July 23, 2002) was a Author from USA.

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