Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed. Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.
-- William Saroyan
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
We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
-- William Saroyan
I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.
-- William Saroyan
I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.
-- William Saroyan
All things lie dark in possibility.
-- William Saroyan
Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
-- William Saroyan
All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
-- William Saroyan
I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.
-- William Saroyan
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
It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
-- William Saroyan
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
What the hell are they all looking for? A way out. A way to the right way out. A way to leave. A way to go. A way to have had it, to have had enough of it, to be done with it. A decent way to give it all over to the giver of it all.
-- William Saroyan
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
-- William Saroyan
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
When I was fifteen and had quit school forever, I went to work in a vineyard near Sanger with a number of Mexicans, one of whom was only a year or two older than myself, an earnest boy named Felipe. One gray, dismal, cold, dreary day in January, while we were pruning muscat vines, I said to this boy, simply in order to be talking, "If you had your wish, Felipe, what would you want to be? A doctor, a farmer, a singer, a painter, a matador, or what?" Felipe thought a minute, and then he said, "Passenger." This was exciting to hear, and definitely something to talk about at some length, which we did. He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship.
-- William Saroyan
The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
-- William Saroyan
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
If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.
-- William Saroyan
What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story. but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.
-- William Saroyan
There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.
-- William Saroyan
This was such bad writing that it was good.
-- William Saroyan
It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.
-- William Saroyan
I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.
-- William Saroyan
The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today.
-- William Saroyan
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. 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
Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was still all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.
-- William Saroyan
I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.
-- William Saroyan
It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.
-- William Saroyan
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
-- William Saroyan
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
I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.
-- William Saroyan
If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.
-- William Saroyan
I do not believe in races.
-- William Saroyan
If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.
-- William Saroyan
I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.
-- William Saroyan
A man must pretend not to be a writer.
-- William Saroyan
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. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.
-- William Saroyan
Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.
-- William Saroyan
Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.
-- William Saroyan
There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.
-- William Saroyan
A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awarness than with geography.
-- William Saroyan
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.
-- William Saroyan
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
-- William Saroyan
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
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.
-- William Saroyan
The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.
-- William Saroyan
My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad.
-- William Saroyan
All great art hasmadness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
-- William Saroyan
Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
-- William Saroyan
The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul.
-- William Saroyan
The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible.
-- William Saroyan
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
-- William Saroyan
Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.
-- William Saroyan
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
In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
-- William Saroyan
I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with.
-- William Saroyan
Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.
-- William Saroyan
I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.
-- William Saroyan
I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
-- William Saroyan
There is only good and bad art.
-- William Saroyan
Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity.
-- William Saroyan
I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.
-- William Saroyan
It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better.
-- William Saroyan
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
Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.
-- William Saroyan
A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.
-- William Saroyan
Don't forget that some things count more than other things.
-- William Saroyan
Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself.
-- William Saroyan
Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art.
-- William Saroyan
The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.
-- William Saroyan
Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.
-- William Saroyan
Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
-- William Saroyan
Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.
-- William Saroyan
My work has always been the product of my time.
-- William Saroyan
Everything is changed
-- William Saroyan
You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give.
-- William Saroyan
Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. 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. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this
-- William Saroyan
I had three secrets and sold them all.
-- William Saroyan
Be, beget, begone.
-- William Saroyan
We know more than we need to know.
-- William Saroyan
Somewhere among every man's ancestors is a prince or a lord, a priest or a saint, and don't forget it. Wake up! Inherit the wealth of your ancestors!.. Stop living like a mouse, live like the rich people do.
-- William Saroyan
One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds.
-- William Saroyan
Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.
-- William Saroyan
My illness is life itself.
-- William Saroyan
Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.
-- William Saroyan
Illness is essentially discomfort, and it is not easy for anybody to be comfortable all the time... in his body, in his work, in his house, or in his soul.
-- William Saroyan
I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.
-- William Saroyan
I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.
-- William Saroyan
A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler.
-- William Saroyan
The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit.
-- William Saroyan
The world was my home and I was glad to be in it.
-- William Saroyan
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
-- William Saroyan
The order I found was the order of disorder.
-- William Saroyan
What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
-- William Saroyan
My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve.
-- William Saroyan
Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.
-- William Saroyan
Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.
-- William Saroyan
Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.
-- William Saroyan
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
The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.
-- William Saroyan
A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead.
-- William Saroyan
At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.
-- William Saroyan
Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.
-- William Saroyan
The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art
-- William Saroyan
In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer.
-- William Saroyan
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
Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner.
-- William Saroyan
I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?"
-- William Saroyan
I believed from the beginning of remembered experience that I was somebody with an incalculable potential for enlargement, somebody who both knew and could find out, upon whom demands could be made with the expectation of having them fulfilled. I felt at the same time, and pretty much constantly, that I was nothing in relation to Enormity, the Unknown, and the Unknowable.
-- William Saroyan
I was four years old, and had long since reasoned that it was folly to expect the big things from people. It was enough to get the little things. The biggest thing, of course, was love, the nearness of somebody you love when you need somebody to be near.
-- William Saroyan
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.
-- William Saroyan
I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.
-- William Saroyan
The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
-- William Saroyan
Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said.
-- William Saroyan
I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene... the drama of life... the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free... the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.
-- William Saroyan
My work is writing, but my real work is being.
-- William Saroyan
To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.
-- William Saroyan
I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?
-- William Saroyan
Without pressure, the work doesn't get done at all.
-- William Saroyan
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