William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Saroyan
Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

William Saroyan
Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.

William Saroyan
Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met.

William Saroyan
You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.

William Saroyan
I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with.

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
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
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
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
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
Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.

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

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

William Saroyan