William Saroyan Quotes

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

Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.

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

Актьорът вдигна поглед към небесата и почувства колко е тъжен, колко приятно му е, че отново е тъжен.

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

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.

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.

My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad.

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.

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

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.

The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible.

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,

Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that. Young Shaw, hello out there.

He got up and stalked out of the house, slamming the screen door.
My mother explained.
He has a gentle heart, she said. It is simply that he is homesick and such a large man.