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William Saroyan
184 quotes
“All things lie dark in possibility.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Baby" (1936)
“Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Three Times Three (1936)
“All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Three Times Three (1936)
“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 (1908–1981) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Little Children (1937)
“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 (1908–1981) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Locomotive 38, the Ojibway" (1940)
“Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Locomotive 38, the Ojibway" (1940)
“The race was over. I was last, by ten yards. Without the slightest hesitation I protested and challenged the runners to another race, same distance, back. They refused to consider my proposal, which proved, I knew, that they were afraid to race me. I told them they knew very well I could beat them.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fifty Yard Dash" (1940)
“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 (1908–1981) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Declaration of War" (1944)
“It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Robert E. Sherwood (1946)
“I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)
“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 (1908–1981) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)
“What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Assyrians (1950)
“What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Armenian Writers : A Short Story" (1954)
“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 (1908–1981) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Armenian Writers : A Short Story" (1954)
“The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy — the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
“Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Beggars" in The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
“I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Beggars" in The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
“One of us is obviously mistaken.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To a critic who had panned his latest play, in The New York Mirror (10 June 1960)
“I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Short Drive, Sweet Chariot (1966)
“Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids — from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream — is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Flashing Dragonfly" (1973)
“The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chance Meetings (1978)
“A neighborhood has a kind of mystical identity which one scarcely suspects let alone notices while one is living there, for living uses up all of a man's time and attention. But in retrospect sooner or later a man remembers an old neighborhood and suddenly notices that there was something fantastic about the place.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chance Meetings (1978)
“Chance meetings with living saints and sons of bitches goes on and on.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chance Meetings (1978)
“My daughter, before she was sixteen, and especially before she was six, absolutely stunned me every day by the simple beauty and sweetness of her truth.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chance Meetings (1978)
“Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memories of the Depression (1981)
“Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement to the Associated Press, five days before his death. (13 May 1981)
“The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted at a Broadway memorial tribute to Saroyan, reported in The New York Times (31 October 1983)
“Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing... Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Saroyan's Literary Quarantine" by Peter H. King, in The Los Angeles Times (26 March 1997).
“I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Saroyan's Literary Quarantine" by Peter H. King, in The Los Angeles Times (26 March 1997).
“Art is what is irresistible.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement to William Bolcom, quoted in "The End of the Mannerist Century" (2004) by William Bolcom, in The Pleasure of Modernist Music edited by Arved Ashby
“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This was such bad writing that it was good.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man must pretend not to be a writer.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.”
William Saroyan (1908–1981) said by 1981 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source