Top 140 William Saroyan Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

55. “Nothing good ever ends.”

— William Saroyan

56. “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.”

— William Saroyan

57. “My work is writing, but my real work is being.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

60. “All writers are discontent. That’s because they’re aware of a potential and believe they’re not reaching it.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

64. “Genius is play, and man’s capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.”

— William Saroyan

65. “Remember that every man is a variation of yourself.”

— William Saroyan

66. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

69. “People are people. Don’t be afraid of them.”

— William Saroyan

70. “You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you’re right.”

— William Saroyan

71. “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.”

— William Saroyan

72. “The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.”

— William Saroyan

73. “One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words.”

— William Saroyan

74. “Future?” Homer said. He was a little embarrassed because all his life, from day to day, he had been busy mapping out a future, even if it was only a future for the next day. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know for sure, but I guess I’d like to be somebody some day.”

— William Saroyan

75. “I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

77. “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.”

— William Saroyan

78. “The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

80. “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.”

— William Saroyan

81. “The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn’t dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.”

— William Saroyan

82. “Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn’t know any better.”

— William Saroyan

83. “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.”

— William Saroyan

84. “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.”

— William Saroyan

85. “Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

87. “The whole world and every human being in it is everybody’s business.”

— William Saroyan

88. “Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”

— William Saroyan

89. “Art is what is irresistible.”

— William Saroyan

90. “What a people talk about means something. What they don’t talk about means something.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

92. “All things lie dark in possibility.”

— William Saroyan

93. “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.”

— William Saroyan

94. “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...”

— William Saroyan

95. “I have never received a telephone call that justified the excitement and fuss of the electronics involved. If I can’t see somebody I love, for instance, such as a daughter, or a son, I would rather receive a letter.”

— William Saroyan

96. “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.”

— William Saroyan

97. “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.”

— William Saroyan

98. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

100. “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.”

— William Saroyan