William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. Success makes a fool of you, but failure can come only from great effort. One who doesn't try cannot fail and become wise.

William Saroyan
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

William Saroyan
In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

William Saroyan
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
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?

William Saroyan
What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.

William Saroyan
A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.

William Saroyan
There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.

William Saroyan
Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth.

William Saroyan
The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun.

William Saroyan
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

William Saroyan
At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.

William Saroyan
I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.

William Saroyan
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
Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.

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
He knew the truth and was looking for something better.

William Saroyan
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

William Saroyan
We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.

William Saroyan
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.

William Saroyan
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.

William Saroyan
What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?

William Saroyan
I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.

William Saroyan
Don't forget that some things count more than other things.

William Saroyan
Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.

William Saroyan