William Saroyan Quotes

“The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.”

— William Saroyan

“I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.”

— William Saroyan

I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.

— William Saroyan

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.”

— William Saroyan

The order I found was the order of disorder

— William Saroyan

“I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant”

— William Saroyan

“It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.”

— William Saroyan

Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers.

— William Saroyan

“Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. 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.”

— William Saroyan

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?

— William Saroyan

“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

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.

— William Saroyan

“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

“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

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

“The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.”

— William Saroyan

“If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.”

— William Saroyan

“Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior”

— William Saroyan

“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

“I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.”

— William Saroyan

“I want time in which to walk quietly over the earth, among uncrazed men. I want time in which to build a house, inhabit it, create a past with meaning. I want time in which to seek and find love. I want time. I want to be unhurried, uncaught. I want time in which to sleep and waken, in which to dream the truth of my being on earth. Time.”

— William Saroyan

Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.

— William Saroyan

“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.
(The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952))”

— William Saroyan

“Morning is best when it begins with the last hours of night ... Enough of culture's hours. I am a peasant. Enough of feasting. I want hunger. Enough of fat. I want muscle. Enough of pity. I want humor. Enough of vanity. I want pride.”

— William Saroyan

“This was such bad writing that it was good.”

— William Saroyan

“What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder.”

— William Saroyan

“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

“You write a hit play the same way you write a flop”

— William Saroyan

“Don't tell me I'm sentimental, you sons of bitches. You are contemptible, your dishonesty is contemptible, your careful plodding with words, to keep them safely captured inside your silly little theories are contemptible, but I don't hate you, because each of you is a sad little pompous son of a bitch, with a chair at a university, and you are fighting bravely to seem to be somebody.”

— William Saroyan

“How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how ... If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.”

— William Saroyan

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

“Of the unchanging things, the town in which you first saw the light is one of the most unchanging. It is always a place of monotony but at the same time, as you grow, change, go away, remember, return, and go away again, it is one of the most inexhaustibly rich places. And yet what it is is so nearly nothing, except for the dull, drab, lonely, lost objects of it, that you never know, each time you return to it, what it is that holds you so strongly to it.”

— William Saroyan

“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

“Whatever neutrality is, it is not very useful to anybody, and time is running out. If we do not do useful things whenever it is possible or necessary to do them, we shall soon be totally departed from the human scene, and forgotten, or remembered only for having disappeared. Armenians are too vital to be permitted to throw themselves away in neutrality, comfort, well-being, satisfaction, and so on and so forth.”

— William Saroyan

“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

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

“No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.”

— William Saroyan

“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

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

“The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.”

— William Saroyan

“Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.”

— William Saroyan

“What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?”

— William Saroyan

“What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?”

— William Saroyan

People are people. Don't be afraid of them.

— William Saroyan

“I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.”

— William Saroyan

“The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?”

— William Saroyan

“My work is writing, but my real work is being.”

— William Saroyan

“Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.”

— William Saroyan

“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

“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