Top 140 William Saroyan Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.”

— William Saroyan

102. “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

103. “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.”

— William Saroyan

104. “What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?”

— William Saroyan

105. “We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”

— William Saroyan

106. “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.”

— William Saroyan

107. “At the corner she looked suddenly far away and saw the street go straight out to the sky. She looked up to the sky and saw it go everywhere, and my, she thought, how large it is, what a large place it is. What a large world. So many different people, so many different places, close by and far away, people everywhere, places everywhere. What a fine place to be in.”

— William Saroyan

108. “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.”

— William Saroyan

109. “My work has always been the product of my time.”

— William Saroyan

110. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

112. “What do you mean, what’s the matter with him? Nothing’s the matter with him, everything’s the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He’s just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn’t know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God’s sake. Where can you go?”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

114. “But who can speak to God, or rather who can’t? The question is, who can get an answer?”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

119. “Everything is changed for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the world has always been full of that loneliness.”

— William Saroyan

120. “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.”

— William Saroyan

121. “Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.”

— William Saroyan

122. “I don’t think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.”

— William Saroyan

123. “When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was hom.”

— William Saroyan

124. “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.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

126. “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.”

— William Saroyan

127. “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.”

— William Saroyan

128. “All I can say is that there is indeed a crisis here. We cannot speak to one another in a meaningful way, every one of us is a leader, a general of the army, a king, a president, the greatest thinker of all time, and so on and so forth. This is the curse of the Armenian race.”

— William Saroyan

129. “He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see.”

— William Saroyan

130. “Whatever neutrality is, it is not very useful to anybody, and time is running out. If we do not do useful things whenever it is possible or necessary to do them, we shall soon be totally departed from the human scene, and forgotten, or remembered only for having disappeared. Armenians are too vital to be permitted to throw themselves away in neutrality, comfort, well-being, satisfaction, and so on and so forth.”

— William Saroyan

131. “What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it’s impossible to help, it’s always possible to hinder.”

— William Saroyan

132. “When I think of the good things still to be written I am glad, for there is no end to them, and I know I myself shall write some of them.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

134. “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.”

— William Saroyan

135. “I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man’s spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?”

— William Saroyan

136. “As for the matter of what we may expect from one another, that is indeed something we are eager to learn – all of us, all our lives, but I wonder, do we ever learn, do we ever really find out?”

— William Saroyan

137. “What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?”

— William Saroyan

138. “I believe in anything that works.”

— William Saroyan

139. “The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.”

— William Saroyan

140. “I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.”

— William Saroyan

141. “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?”

— William Saroyan

142. “If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.”

— William Saroyan

143. “The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.”

— William Saroyan

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

— William Saroyan

145. “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.”

— William Saroyan