William Saroyan Quotes

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.

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

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. Laugher 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.

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

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.

All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another.

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is.

He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops

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

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

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

Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.

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.

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.

What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me.

I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners...I want my children to be people- each one separate- each one special- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others

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

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

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

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.

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.

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does.

Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.

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.

The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.

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

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.

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.

I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.

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

Whoever the kid had been, whoever had had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: )You just change your attitude now please, young man.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.

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.

I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.

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.

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

I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?

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

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