William Saroyan Quotes

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

~ William Saroyan

But 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.

~ William Saroyan

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

~ William Saroyan

I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.

~ 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

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

~ William Saroyan

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

~ William Saroyan

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

When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.

~ William Saroyan

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

~ William Saroyan

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.

~ William Saroyan

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.

~ William Saroyan

You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party

~ William Saroyan

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

~ William Saroyan

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

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

The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.

~ 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 — 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

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?

~ William Saroyan

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant

~ William Saroyan

What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder.

~ William Saroyan

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

~ William Saroyan

I care so much about everything that I care about nothing

~ William Saroyan

Every man in the world is better than some one else. And not as good as some one else.

~ William Saroyan

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

~ William Saroyan

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

~ William Saroyan