William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable.

William Saroyan
The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?

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
Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself.

William Saroyan
I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.

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
When I was fifteen and had quit school forever, I went to work in a vineyard near Sanger with a number of Mexicans, one of whom was only a year or two older than myself, an earnest boy named Felipe. One gray, dismal, cold, dreary day in January, while we were pruning muscat vines, I said to this boy, simply in order to be talking, "If you had your wish, Felipe, what would you want to be? A doctor, a farmer, a singer, a painter, a matador, or what?" Felipe thought a minute, and then he said, "Passenger." This was exciting to hear, and definitely something to talk about at some length, which we did. He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship.

William Saroyan
It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better.

William Saroyan
Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.

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
Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.

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
All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

William Saroyan
The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.

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
Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?

William Saroyan
The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today.

William Saroyan
The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.

William Saroyan
It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.

William Saroyan
He knew the truth and was looking for something better.

William Saroyan
It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.

William Saroyan
How did money ever happen? What's it mean? What's it for?

William Saroyan
Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.

William Saroyan
The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible.

William Saroyan
I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all.

William Saroyan
I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.

William Saroyan
One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.

William Saroyan
I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.

William Saroyan
In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.

William Saroyan
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.

William Saroyan