William Saroyan Quotes

“All things lie dark in possibility.”

“Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.”

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

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

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

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

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”

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

“I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered.

Go ahead, destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia.”

“I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.”

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

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

“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 — 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.”

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

“There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia.

There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.”

“Try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again – in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.”

“Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair.

A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

“All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.”