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William Saroyan Quotes

• Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth. - View Quote Details on Love of the streets is the love out of which…
• Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it. - View Quote Details on Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never…
• In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today. - View Quote Details on In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today,…
• Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what? - View Quote Details on Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception…
• Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends. - View Quote Details on Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.
• I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with. - View Quote Details on I have made a fiasco of my life, but I…
• The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today. - View Quote Details on The only thing I can talk about is the cold…
• The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. - View Quote Details on The most solid advice for a writer is this, I…
• I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres… I laugh, that’s all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed. - View Quote Details on I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are…
• Illness must be considered to be as natural as health. - View Quote Details on Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.
• I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it. - View Quote Details on I believe in my work and am eager for others…
• It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear. - View Quote Details on It is impossible not to notice that our world is…
• I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little. - View Quote Details on I began to write in the first place because I…
• A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler. - View Quote Details on A man cannot write a poem or a story that…
• When I was fifteen and had quit school forever, I went to work in a vineyard near Sanger with a number of Mexicans, one of whom was only a year or two older than myself, an earnest boy named Felipe. One gray, dismal, cold, dreary day in January, while we were pruning muscat vines, I said to this boy, simply in order to be talking, “If you had your wish, Felipe, what would you want to be? A doctor, a farmer, a singer, a painter, a matador, or what?” Felipe thought a minute, and then he said, “Passenger.” This was exciting to hear, and definitely something to talk about at some length, which we did. He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship. - View Quote Details on When I was fifteen and had quit school forever, I…
• What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all. - View Quote Details on What the hell are they all looking for? A way…
• My work is writing, but my real work is being. - View Quote Details on My work is writing, but my real work is being.
• I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all. - View Quote Details on I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from…
• If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man. - View Quote Details on If I have any desire at all, it is to…
• Everything is changed — for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the whole world has always been full of that loneliness. The loneliness does not come from the War. The War did not make it. It was the loneliness that made the War. - View Quote Details on Everything is changed — for you. But it is still…
• The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith. - View Quote Details on The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy…
• Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body.
  For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect. - View Quote Details on Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man…
• Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don’t expect you to understand anything I’m telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life. - View Quote Details on Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand,…
• Art is what is irresistible. - View Quote Details on Art is what is irresistible.
• There is only good and bad art. - View Quote Details on There is only good and bad art.
• Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace. - View Quote Details on Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed…
• There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth. - View Quote Details on There is a small area of land in Asia Minor…
• The order I found was the order of disorder. - View Quote Details on The order I found was the order of disorder.
• It’s all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now. Andranik is dead. The nation is lost. I’m no Armenian. I’m an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn’t do it. - View Quote Details on It’s all over. We can begin to forget Armenia now…
• There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future. - View Quote Details on There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human…
• I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth. - View Quote Details on I see life as one life at one time, so…
• We didn’t say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in. - View Quote Details on We didn’t say anything because there was such an awful…
• A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead. - View Quote Details on A writer wants what he has to say to be…
• I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don’t. If you can weigh it, it isn’t worth the bother. It isn’t what you’re after. It isn’t going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, “That’s that, where do we go from here?” - View Quote Details on I was never interested in the obvious, or in the…
• Don’t forget that some things count more than other things. - View Quote Details on Don’t forget that some things count more than other things.
• I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich. - View Quote Details on I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality…
• My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world. - View Quote Details on My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more…
• I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one’s hunches about somebody one has met. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity. - View Quote Details on I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this…
• I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man’s spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even? - View Quote Details on I am interested in madness. I believe it is the…
• I care so much about everything that I care about nothing. - View Quote Details on I care so much about everything that I care about…
• I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable. - View Quote Details on I love Armenian people — all of them. I love…
• I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living. - View Quote Details on I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and…
• My work has always been the product of my time. - View Quote Details on My work has always been the product of my time.
• If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language. - View Quote Details on If I want to do anything, I want to speak…
• Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him. - View Quote Details on Every man alive in the world is a beggar of…
• How did roses ever happen? - View Quote Details on How did roses ever happen?
• When Andranik went away… I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry. - View Quote Details on When Andranik went away… I saw that tears were in…
• Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind. - View Quote Details on Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence…
• Saroyan’s output from 1934 to 1940 established his reputation. What enthralled critics and readers was the brashness and certainty of his daring: Beginning with his first collection of linked short stories — written in 30 days, a story each day — and mailed off to Whit Burnett at Story Magazine. This was a new, fresh, exuberant kind of writing, intensely personal, prose poems which departed from customary narrative structures and sauntered elliptically with the awe of a young man fully realizing the most self-evident of truths: himself, alive upon the earth…. My recollection of those first Saroyan stories is typical: watching his language mesh the spiritual hunger and the actual physical hunger of the penniless main character was to be in the presence of a breathtaking act of creation.
  Hope and possibility were mandatory components to the human comedy as Saroyan viewed it. Accepting madness as the only constant in the universe never precluded joy and laughter. Cynicism had no place in the way one approached each day. Whimsy, compassion, a ready smile and the gift of interior and exterior motion were to be the tools. - View Quote Details on Saroyan’s output from 1934 to 1940 established his reputation. What…
• I have read books about the behavior of mobs — The Mob by Le Bon, if I remember rightly, was one — about the crime in children, and the genius in them, about the greatest bodies of things, and about the littlest of them. I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw. - View Quote Details on I have read books about the behavior of mobs —…
• Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow. - View Quote Details on Art and religion would not be able to stop the…
• The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real. - View Quote Details on The real story can never be told. It is untellable…
• Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn’t even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said? - View Quote Details on Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated…
• I do not believe in races. - View Quote Details on I do not believe in races.
• I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive. - View Quote Details on I have a faint idea what it is like to…
• Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world. - View Quote Details on Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that…
• The whole world and every human being in it is everybody’s business. - View Quote Details on The whole world and every human being in it is…
• My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve. - View Quote Details on My writing is careless, but all through it is something…
• I don’t think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being. - View Quote Details on I don’t think my writing is sentimental, although it is…
• A man must pretend not to be a writer. - View Quote Details on A man must pretend not to be a writer.
• I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn’t it the least we can do for one another? - View Quote Details on I did my best, and let me urge you to…
• Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind. - View Quote Details on Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence…
• When, at the age of eighteen, I was the manager of the Postal Telegraph office at 21 Taylor Street in San Francisco, I remember having been asked by the clerk there, a man named Clifford, who the hell I thought I was. And I remember replying very simply and earnestly somewhat as follows: If you have ever heard of George Bernard Shaw, if you have ever read his plays or prefaces, you will know what I mean when I tell you that I am that man by another name.
  Who is he? I remember the clerk asking.
  George Bernard Shaw, I replied, is the tonic of the Christian peoples of the world. He is health, wisdom, and comedy, and that’s what I am too.
  How do you figure? The clerk said.
  Don’t bother me, I said. I’m the night manager of this office and when I tell you something it’s final. - View Quote Details on When, at the age of eighteen, I was the manager…
• I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for food. - View Quote Details on I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry,…
• You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give. - View Quote Details on You must remember always to give, of everything you have…
• I say the time is ripe for a William Saroyan revival… Bill Saroyan, that rollicking elf of an author who knew well of irony and compassion and laughter, wrote first-class original works for television, and the adaptations of his plays invariably hit the mark.
  I am thinking now in particular of the Playhouse 90 production of “The Time of Your Life.” In it Jackie Gleason delivered a tremendous portrayal as Joe the philosopher who had this wistful greeting for everyone who entered the bar: “What’s the dream?”… In one of his last essays you may find a perceptive line that tells of the Saroyan working philosophy: “The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it.”… He looked, William Saroyan, exactly the way you would expect him to look. He had a huge mustache and a booming voice and a commanding presence. He was exuberant. He was mischievous. He was fun…. How he could make the English language soar! His words danced. This was writing that was never inhabited by wallflowers. This was Bill Saroyan. - View Quote Details on I say the time is ripe for a William Saroyan…
• The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn. - View Quote Details on The weakness of art is that great poems do not…
• Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won’t kill anything. There will always be poets in the world. - View Quote Details on Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won’t kill anything…
• The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit. - View Quote Details on The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I…
• All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy. - View Quote Details on All I can do is write my stories for mankind,…
• Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way. - View Quote Details on Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the…
• The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness. - View Quote Details on The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you…
• I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest. - View Quote Details on I was an old man by the time I took…
• What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America. - View Quote Details on What a lonely and silly thing it is to be…
• Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive. - View Quote Details on Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy,…
• It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work. - View Quote Details on It is the heart of man that I am trying…

About William Saroyan

William Saroyan (31 August 1908 - 18 May 1981 ) was an Armenian American author, famous for his novel The Human Comedy (1943), and other works dealing with the comedies and tragedies of everyday existence.

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