William Saroyan Quotes

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.

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.

We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

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

To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book

The order I found was the order of disorder

Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met.

Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.

The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.

I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.

I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else-- and better too!

The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.

Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.

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

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.

All things lie dark in possibility.

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

Kids are always the only future the human race has.

My work has always been the product of my time.

My work is writing, but my real work is being.

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

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.

What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?

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

Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.

You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.

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

It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.

Nothing good ever ends.

Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

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 believe in anything that works.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.

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.

Art is what is irresistible.

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

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. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

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

I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.

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?

The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.

The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?

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

The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

People are people. Don't be afraid of them.

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.

All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.