I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.

Chaim Potok Quotes