William Saroyan quotes - page 2

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)

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.

William Saroyan

You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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.

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

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

William Saroyan

I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

William Saroyan

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. (William Saroyan)

Art is what is irresistible.

William Saroyan

Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.

William Saroyan

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.

William Saroyan

I love Armenian people - all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable.

William Saroyan

I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.

William Saroyan

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

If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.

William Saroyan

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

I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

William Saroyan

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy. (William Saroyan)

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.

William Saroyan

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

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

My work has always been the product of my time.

William Saroyan

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William Saroyan

William Saroyan - Image

Occupation: Armenian-American Novelist
Born: August 31, 1908
Died: May 18, 1981
Quotes count: 207
Wikipedia: William Saroyan

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