William Saroyan Quotes

I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.

I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.

Before the cat tastes the fish, his whiskers must feel the head.

In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed...In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.

The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.

A man must pretend not to be a writer.

The bicycle is a city thing, virtually useless anywhere excepting on a pavement or hard surface of some kind. Without the road it would never have been invented. It is a little mad, both in design and purpose. Two wheels held together in a frame, with a simple mechanical system enabling a forward movement for one person.

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop

I had three secrets and sold them all.

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

My work is writing, but my real work is being.

Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him.

To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.

Chance meetings with living saints and sons of bitches goes on and on.

What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.