Top 140 William Saroyan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

— William Saroyan

2. “Live, for this is the time of your life.”

— William Saroyan

3. “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.”

— William Saroyan

4. “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.”

— William Saroyan

Featured in: Anger Quotes

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

— William Saroyan

6. “A man’s ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.”

— William Saroyan

7. “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.”

— William Saroyan

8. “If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

12. “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

14. “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.”

— William Saroyan

15. “Think before you speak, think twice before you shout, think three times before you go mad.”

— William Saroyan

16. “When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.”

— William Saroyan

17. “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.”

— William Saroyan

18. “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.”

— William Saroyan

19. “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.”

— William Saroyan

20. “Kids are always the only future the human race has.”

— William Saroyan

21. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

25. “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.”

— William Saroyan

26. “I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else – and better too!”

— William Saroyan

27. “I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness.”

— William Saroyan

28. “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.”

— William Saroyan

29. “Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

31. “I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.”

— William Saroyan

32. “You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.”

— William Saroyan

33. “I can’t hate for long. It isn’t worth it.”

— William Saroyan

34. “I want time in which to walk quietly over the earth, among uncrazed men. I want time in which to build a house, inhabit it, create a past with meaning. I want time in which to seek and find love. I want time. I want to be unhurried, uncaught. I want time in which to sleep and waken, in which to dream the truth of my being on earth. Time.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

36. “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.”

— William Saroyan

37. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

39. “The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

41. “The order I found was the order of disorder.”

— William Saroyan

42. “My uncle Khosrove became very irritated and shouted, It’s no harm. What is the loss of a horse? Haven’t we all lost the homeland? What is this crying over a horse?”

— William Saroyan

43. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

45. “One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you’re lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.”

— William Saroyan

Featured in: Fun Quotes

46. “She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn’t like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn’t stop, and she didn’t like that at all.”

— William Saroyan

47. “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?”

— William Saroyan

48. “I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan