William Saroyan Quotes

Cowards are the nicest people, the most interesting, the gentlest, the most refined, the least likely to commit crimes.

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.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

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.

You abandon most readily those works that have no destination other than your own wishes; there is no editor or producer standing there waiting for them... I've told every young writer I know to do the job all the way through even if they think it's no good. Then they'll have the precedent of having finished work.

I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

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?

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?" .

Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.

A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain.

One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words

Dear lady, ... dear gentleman, reader, [it's] not right ... to put down this writer on his writing ... And I'll tell you why, too: it hurts, that's why.... People try to understand why writers commit suicide by jumping off boats or by alcoholism or by being heroic continuously or by rope or gun or drug or knife or water, and ... I can tell you straight out, ... it is reading slurring remarks about their writing that drives writers to the grave. Dirty remarks passed by ... dirty but damned nicely educated and very highly-paid ladies and gentlemen have the effect of killing writers. Yes, that's right. Dirty words ... in slick paper magazines read by smart people do assassinate writers. ... And boy let me tell you I am all for it, even when by some ... misunderstanding the dirty words are directed to me rather than to the party really deserving them. Accidents happen, dear clever reviewer or critic, and let it not be said that William Saroyan is one not to see a situation from the point of view of the other party, ... and I shall be the first to defend your right to be critical and even sarcastic, knowing full well that it is not about me and my writing, although my name is by mistake taken in vain by you. ... But go on, go on, do your good clever writing, every one of you, I am home, your are home, and we are each of us not yet on Variety's Necrology list, so if we can't take it, who can?

In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.

Don't tell me I'm sentimental, you sons of bitches. You are contemptible, your dishonesty is contemptible, your careful plodding with words, to keep them safely captured inside your silly little theories are contemptible, but I don't hate you, because each of you is a sad little pompous son of a bitch, with a chair at a university, and you are fighting bravely to seem to be somebody.

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.