William Saroyan Quotes

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."

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

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.

Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.

You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.

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.

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

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

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.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

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

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

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

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

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

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Live, for this is the time of your life.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.

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.

People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be.

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