William Saroyan Quotes

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

Nothing good ever ends.

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

The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.

What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners...I want my children to be people- each one separate- each one special- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others

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.

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

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.

We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them.

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.

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

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

The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

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.

Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.

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.

What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.

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.

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.

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.

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

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

Kids are always the only future the human race has.

Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

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?

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

If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life......San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.

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

I believe in anything that works.

I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.

We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.