William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

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

William Saroyan
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
I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

William Saroyan
Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way.

William Saroyan
Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do.

William Saroyan
She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.

William Saroyan
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.

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
Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body.
For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.

William Saroyan
I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for food.

William Saroyan
Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.

William Saroyan
Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.

William Saroyan
A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead.

William Saroyan
Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.

William Saroyan
The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul.

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

William Saroyan
Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?

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

William Saroyan
One day, back there in the good old days when I was nine and the world was full of every kind of magnificence, and life was still a delightful and mysterious dream, my cousin Mourad, who was considered crazy by everybody who knew him except me, came to my house at four in the morning and woke me up by tapping on the window of my room.
"Aram," he said.
I jumped out of bed and looked out the window.
I couldn't believe what I saw.
It wasn't morning yet, but it was summer and with daybreak not many minutes around the corner of the world it was light enough for me to know I wasn't dreaming.
My cousin Mourad was sitting on a beautiful white horse.

William Saroyan
My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?

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
I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever.

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

William Saroyan
He was just a young man who'd come to town on a donkey, bored to death or something, who'd taken advantage of the chance to be entertained by a small-town kid who was bored to death, too. That's the only way I could figure it out without accepting the general theory that he was crazy.

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
Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.

William Saroyan
I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

William Saroyan
If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.

William Saroyan