I started to write when I was fourteen years old. I’ve been writing since I really was a kid. I wanted to write the day I finished reading a novel that really changed my life. It was a novel about upper-class British Catholics. … You won’t believe this story. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. It absolutely changed my life. It was an extraordinary encounter with that novel. It was the first serious adult fiction I had ever read. I lived inside that book with more intensity than I lived inside my own world. It was the exact reverse of anything you would think would affect a nice Jewish boy in New York going to a Jewish parochial school. When I closed the book, I was overwhelmed by my relationship to that book. I remember asking myself, ‘What did he do to me? How do you do this kind of thing with words?’ That’s where my commitment to write began. It was really born - very concretely - out of that encounter, with that one book. And it lasted.
- Chaim Potok, 1976
This is just so wonderful to hear.