Top 100 William, Saroyan Quotes
#1. He got up and stalked out of the house, slamming the screen door.
My mother explained.
He has a gentle heart, she said. It is simply that he is homesick and such a large man.
William, Saroyan
#3. Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
William, Saroyan
#4. He's finding out, he's doing all right, he'll go to school but nobody's going to teach him anything.
William, Saroyan
#5. No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.
William, Saroyan
#6. All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
William, Saroyan
#7. Eating cherries on a hot July afternoon in Michigan is one of the greatest things that can happen to anybody, and here it is right now - three minutes after three - happening to ME, and to you.
William, Saroyan
#8. Remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic there is always the comic and in the midst that which is most evil there is always much good.
William, Saroyan
#9. I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.
William, Saroyan
#10. Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
William, Saroyan
#11. You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
William, Saroyan
#12. The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.
William, Saroyan
#13. My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It's no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven't we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?
William, Saroyan
#14. The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.
William, Saroyan
#15. When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was hom
William, Saroyan
#16. Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
William, Saroyan
#17. I love the bicycle. I always have. I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle.
William, Saroyan
#18. Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.
William, Saroyan
#19. In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.
William, Saroyan
#20. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.
William, Saroyan
#23. The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William, Saroyan
#24. I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
William, Saroyan
#26. But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
William, Saroyan
#27. I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.
William, Saroyan
#29. Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.
William, Saroyan
#30. The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
William, Saroyan
#31. He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see.
William, Saroyan
#32. 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.
William, Saroyan
#33. A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
William, Saroyan
#34. We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.
William, Saroyan
#35. Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.
William, Saroyan
#36. There is no real freedom for the man who is in so much of a hurry that he is annoyed by the human race and by the hot glaring afternoon sun.
William, Saroyan
#37. I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else
and better too!
William, Saroyan
#40. The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.
William, Saroyan
#41. All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another.
William, Saroyan
#42. I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
William, Saroyan
#43. I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.
William, Saroyan
#44. 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.
William, Saroyan
#45. All I can say is that there is indeed a crisis here. We cannot speak to one another in a meaningful way, every one of us is a leader, a general of the army, a king, a president, the greatest thinker of all time, and so on and so forth. This is the curse of the Armenian race.
William, Saroyan
#46. I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.
William, Saroyan
#47. Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
William, Saroyan
#48. Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.
William, Saroyan
#49. A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.
William, Saroyan
#50. What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder.
William, Saroyan
#51. Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.
William, Saroyan
#52. Think before you speak, think twice before you shout, think three times before you go mad.
William, Saroyan
#53. 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.
William, Saroyan
#54. One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words
William, Saroyan
#55. Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.
William, Saroyan
#58. San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
William, Saroyan
#59. When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
William, Saroyan
#60. The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
William, Saroyan
#61. Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.
William, Saroyan
#62. There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?
William, Saroyan
#63. It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
William, Saroyan
#64. ...Each of you will begin to be truly human when, in spite of your natural dislike of one another, you still respect one another. That is what it means to be civilized.
William, Saroyan
#66. I wanted to know her the way a bee wants to know a great bright flower.
William, Saroyan
#67. San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.
William, Saroyan
#68. The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
William, Saroyan
#69. The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.
William, Saroyan
#70. The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.
William, Saroyan
#71. The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself ...
William, Saroyan
#72. Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.
William, Saroyan
#73. What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
William, Saroyan
#74. Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them.
William, Saroyan
#75. There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
William, Saroyan
#76. It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.
William, Saroyan
#77. Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.
William, Saroyan
#79. What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
William, Saroyan
#80. The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.
William, Saroyan
#81. This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep.
William, Saroyan
#82. The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.
William, Saroyan
#84. The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?
William, Saroyan
#85. Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
William, Saroyan
#86. Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.
William, Saroyan
#87. Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
William, Saroyan
#88. 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.
William, Saroyan
#89. Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
William, Saroyan
#91. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
William, Saroyan
#92. I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.
William, Saroyan
#93. Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
William, Saroyan
#94. Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
William, Saroyan
#95. One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.
William, Saroyan
#97. Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William, Saroyan
#99. Future?" Homer said. He was a little embarrassed because all his life, from day to day, he had been busy mapping out a future, even if it was only a future for the next day. "Well," he said, "I don't know for sure, but I guess I'd like to be somebody some day.
William, Saroyan
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