William Saroyan Quotes

173 Sourced Quotes

I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money.

William Saroyan
It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.

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

William Saroyan
Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.

William Saroyan
Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.

William Saroyan
Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

William Saroyan
Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.

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

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

William Saroyan
What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.

William Saroyan