William Saroyan quotes

William Saroyan was an Armenian-American writer and playwright, celebrated for his stories and plays about the immigrant experience and everyday life. His works often highlight themes of human kindness, resilience, and the joys and struggles of ordinary people. He received international acclaim and won major awards for his unique literary voice. Here are 207 of his quotes:

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

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.

William Saroyan

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

William Saroyan

What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.

William Saroyan

There is only good and bad art.

William Saroyan

I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with.

William Saroyan

Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small.

William Saroyan

Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?

William Saroyan

We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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. Laughter 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.

William Saroyan

Don't forget that some things count more than other things.

William Saroyan

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?

William Saroyan