William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.

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

William Saroyan
I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us—from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?

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

William Saroyan
Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.

William Saroyan
Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.

William Saroyan
The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.

William Saroyan
The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real.

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
You act as if you know more than I'll ever know, but I've forgotten more than you'll ever know. You're snobs, too. Every man I've ever met has been a snob. You don't have to be a snob, too, do you? Please sign this piece of paper, so I can be a member of the public library and read books and find out about people. I don't want to hate you, I just can't help it.

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
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
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
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

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
I have read books about the behavior of mobs — The Mob by Le Bon, if I remember rightly, was one — about the crime in children, and the genius in them, about the greatest bodies of things, and about the littlest of them. I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw.

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

William Saroyan
I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.

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

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

William Saroyan
Now, having a play on the same bill with a play by the one and only, the good and great, the impish and noble, the man and superman, George Bernard Shaw, is for me an honor, and I think a most fitting thing.

William Saroyan
Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.

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
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