Quotesdtb.com
Home
Authors
Quotes of the day
Top quotes
Topics
William Saroyan quotes - page 5
The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.
William Saroyan
I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inaccessible, inside all and careless of all.
William Saroyan
My illness is life itself.
William Saroyan
I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful - especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken - but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.
William Saroyan
Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.
William Saroyan
Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.
William Saroyan
Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.
William Saroyan
A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.
William Saroyan
How did roses ever happen?
William Saroyan
Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.
William Saroyan
There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.
William Saroyan
Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner.
William Saroyan
My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve.
William Saroyan
One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds.
William Saroyan
I had three secrets and sold them all.
William Saroyan
I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.
William Saroyan
Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.
William Saroyan
We know more than we need to know.
William Saroyan
This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for.
William Saroyan
When Andranik went away... I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry.
William Saroyan
Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.
William Saroyan
Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way.
William Saroyan
Previous
1
2
3
4
5
(Current)
6
7
8
9
Next
William Saroyan
Occupation:
Armenian-American Novelist
Born:
August 31, 1908
Died:
May 18, 1981
Quotes count:
207
Wikipedia:
William Saroyan
Related authors
Carol Grace
2
American Actress
Walter Matthau
6
American Actor
Ernest Hemingway
571
American Author
Mickey Rooney
18
American Actor
Meg Ryan
25
American Actress
Henry Miller
294
American Author
John Steinbeck
439
American Author
Eugene O'Neill
49
American Dramatist
W. Somerset Maugham
255
English Playwright
Clifford Odets
10
American Playwright