William Saroyan Quotes

A neighborhood has a kind of mystical identity which one scarcely suspects let alone notices while one is living there, for living uses up all of a man's time and attention. But in retrospect sooner or later a man remembers an old neighborhood and suddenly notices that there was something fantastic about the place.

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

I miss you of course and I think of you all the time. I am O.K., and even though I have never believed in wars - and know them to be foolish, even when they are necessary - I am proud that I am involved since so many others are, and this is what's happening. I do not recognize any enemy which is human, for no human being can be my enemy. Whoever he is, he is my friend. My quarrel is not with him, but with that unfortunate part of him which I seek to destroy in myself first.

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

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. 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.

What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners…I want my children to be people– each one separate– each one special– each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others

He's finding out, he's doing all right, he'll go to school but nobody's going to teach him anything.

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

Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.

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.

Morning is best when it begins with the last hours of night. ...Enough of culture's hours. I am a peasant. Enough of feasting. I want hunger. Enough of fat. I want muscle. Enough of pity. I want humor. Enough of vanity. I want pride.

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

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?

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 — that is, the meaningful-real.

I was afraid I might actually know him, might have known him, one of perhaps three hundred Fresno boys I had known thirty years ago, because if I *did* know him, I would have to make something of it, and this just wasn't the time for it.