Quotes by William Saroyan

What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.

Good people are good because they have come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.

What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.

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.

But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?

My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It's no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven't we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?

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.

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

The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.

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.

But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.

He got up and stalked out of the house, slamming the screen door.
My mother explained.
He has a gentle heart, she said. It is simply that he is homesick and such a large man.

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

Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior.

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

Art is what is irresistible.

Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.

The order I found was the order of disorder.

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

All things lie dark in possibility.

Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers.

It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.

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

Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.

If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is no longer a thief.

You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.

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,.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

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.

No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.

To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book.

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.

Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

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

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

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.

Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.

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.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.

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

All of the sudden, he said, I feel different -- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for.

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.

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

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.

Whoever the kid had been, whoever had 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.

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.

The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?

In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

In the time of your life, live-so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

Live, for this is the time of your life.

In the time of your life, live--so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.

All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another.

The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.

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.

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.

My work is writing, but my real work is being.

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.

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.

Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.

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.

The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.

Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.

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.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself.

I know you will remember this -- that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world -- no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.

The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.