William Saroyan Quotes

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

The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

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.

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.

What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?

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

There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?

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

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

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.

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.

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

San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.

I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.

Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.

Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.

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

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.

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

If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.

The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.

I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.

When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.

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.

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

I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

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

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

My work has always been the product of my time.

Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.

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