William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.

William Saroyan
There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.

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

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

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

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

William Saroyan
My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world.

William Saroyan
I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.

William Saroyan
Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

William Saroyan
Illness is essentially discomfort, and it is not easy for anybody to be comfortable all the time... in his body, in his work, in his house, or in his soul.

William Saroyan
I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.

William Saroyan
There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.

William Saroyan
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.

William Saroyan
Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.

William Saroyan
Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.

William Saroyan
If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.

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

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

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
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