Top 100 William Saroyan Sayings
#1. I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy.
Jonathan Evison
#2. 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.
William, Saroyan
#3. 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
#4. You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.
William, Saroyan
#6. Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
William, Saroyan
#7. The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
William, Saroyan
#8. He's finding out, he's doing all right, he'll go to school but nobody's going to teach him anything.
William, Saroyan
#9. The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.
William, Saroyan
#10. No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.
William, Saroyan
#11. All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
William, Saroyan
#12. 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
#14. 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
#15. I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.
William, Saroyan
#16. I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.
William, Saroyan
#17. Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
William, Saroyan
#18. You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
William, Saroyan
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.
William, Saroyan
#22. 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
#23. Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
William, Saroyan
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.
William, Saroyan
#30. The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William, Saroyan
#31. As for the matter of what we may expect from one another, that is indeed something we are eager to learn - all of us, all our lives, but I wonder, do we ever learn, do we ever really find out?
William, Saroyan
#32. I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
William, Saroyan
#33. We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
William, Saroyan
#35. But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
William, Saroyan
#36. Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
(Something About a Soldier (1940))
William, Saroyan
#37. There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
William, Saroyan
#38. 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
#39. Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.
William, Saroyan
#40. 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.
William, Saroyan
#42. All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
William, Saroyan
#43. Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.
William, Saroyan
#44. The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
William, Saroyan
#45. He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see.
William, Saroyan
#46. People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be.
William, Saroyan
#47. 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
#48. I have never received a telephone call that justified the excitement and fuss of the electronics involved. If I can't see somebody I love, for instance, such as a daughter, or a son, I would rather receive a letter.
William, Saroyan
#49. A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
William, Saroyan
#50. We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.
William, Saroyan
#51. If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.
William, Saroyan
#52. 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
#53. 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
#55. I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else
and better too!
William, Saroyan
#56. All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
William, Saroyan
#58. This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
William, Saroyan
#60. 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
#61. 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.
William, Saroyan
#62. Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.
William, Saroyan
#63. 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
#64. I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
William, Saroyan
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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,
William, Saroyan
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.
William, Saroyan
#73. Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.
William, Saroyan
#74. If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life ... San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.
William, Saroyan
#75. What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder.
William, Saroyan
#76. It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
William, Saroyan
#77. 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
#78. But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.
William, Saroyan
#79. Think before you speak, think twice before you shout, think three times before you go mad.
William, Saroyan
#80. No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.
William, Saroyan
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
William, Saroyan
#85. What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?
William, Saroyan
#86. The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
William, Saroyan
#89. In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
William, Saroyan
#90. I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.
William, Saroyan
#91. I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
William, Saroyan
#92. 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
#93. When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
William, Saroyan
#94. The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
William, Saroyan
#95. All of the sudden," he said, "I feel different
not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for
William, Saroyan
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.
William, Saroyan
#99. I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
(- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)
William, Saroyan
#100. If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.
William, Saroyan
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