William Saroyan Quotes - Page 6

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

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.

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

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

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

Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.

The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.

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

What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.

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.

I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.

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

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.

There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.

Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.

All of the sudden," he said, "I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for

Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.