William Saroyan Quotes

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan
Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.
William Saroyan
Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.
William Saroyan
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan
Be grateful for yourself... be thankful.
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 and with them.
William Saroyan
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan
Every man in the world is better than some one else. And not as good as some one else.
William Saroyan
All things lie dark in possibility.
William Saroyan
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing
William Saroyan
Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
William Saroyan
Dear lady, ... dear gentleman, reader, [it's] not right ... to put down this writer on his writing ... And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why.... People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and ... I can tell you straight out, ... it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by ... dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words ... in slick paper magazines read by smart people do assassinate writers. ... And boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some ... misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them. Accidents happen, dear clever reviewer or critic, and let it not be said that William Saroyan is one not to see a situation from the point of view of the other party, ... and I shall be the first to defend your right to be critical and even sarcastic, knowing full well that it is not about me and my writing, although my name is by mistake taken in vain by you. ... But go on, go on, do your good clever writing, every one of you, I am home, your are home, and we are each of us not yet on Variety's Necrology list, so if we can't take it, who can?
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
I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant
William Saroyan
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop
William Saroyan
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
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.
William Saroyan
But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the world as a family. In those days, also, it was unheard of, by us certainly, that to get any help, even from members of our own family, let alone from the government, which would have been disgraceful. Thank God that that kind of folly in thinking is obsolete. There is a temptation to feel, ‘Well, we all made it; why can’t these other poor people make it?’ And, of course, nothing is more than stupid than that attitude. I must confess that I find that attitude among many countrymen of my own who do find themselves taking undue pride in their own sense of ability — of being equal to any situation, and of seeing it through and improving it, and so on. And then, putting that against other people who don’t have that, and thereby implying that the other people are lazy. Not taking into account the whole different structure and identity and a people who have survived for centuries under very harsh conditions and members of a very great culture, and I am talking about the Indians, to begin with, in the Valley — the San Joaquin Valley, in Fresno, in Tulare, and the mountains, and there are many tribes of them, of different kinds, and I am talking about, also, the Mestizos, the mixtures of Mexican, Spaniards with Indians, making the Mexican. And I am talking about any minority which is considered by anybody as being innately of itself indolent. This kind of narrow thinking is a temptation to all sorts of people, and one has to be sympathetic with the people who are wrong, too, you see. It is not enough just to be sympathetic with the people who are belittled; it is necessary to be sympathetic with the people who belittle them. So, in worrying about the persecuted, one is obliged also to worry about the persecutors. I consider that a basic measure of growth.
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
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
William Saroyan
The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
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
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
You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party
William Saroyan
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
William Saroyan
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
William Saroyan
A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.
William Saroyan
When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
William Saroyan
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
All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
William Saroyan
Remember that every man is a variation of yourself
William Saroyan
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
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
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
William Saroyan
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
William Saroyan
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan
It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
William Saroyan
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
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
William Saroyan