William Saroyan - Art Quotes

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The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

William Saroyan
Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art.

William Saroyan
How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands.... If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

William Saroyan
Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there's no game, there's no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation at all. It is good to care - in any dimension. More Americans put their caring into baseball than into anything else I can think of - and most put at least a little of it there. Baseball can be trusted, as great art can, and bad art can't.

William Saroyan
Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.

William Saroyan
All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

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

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
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
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