William Saroyan quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by William Saroyan

Top William Saroyan Quotes

Browse top 63 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by William Saroyan.

Favorite William Saroyan Quotes

1. "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

2. "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

3. "My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?" ~ William Saroyan

4. "Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all." ~ William Saroyan

5. "Be, beget, begone." ~ William Saroyan

6. "Future?" Homer said. He was a little embarrassed because all his life, from day to day, he had been busy mapping out a future, even if it was only a future for the next day. "Well," he said, "I don't know for sure, but I guess I'd like to be somebody some day." ~ William Saroyan

7. "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," ~ William Saroyan

8. "A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography." ~ William Saroyan

9. "This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep." ~ William Saroyan

10. "Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength." ~ William Saroyan

11. "Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. 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. His body can be taken, but not him." ~ William Saroyan

12. "This was such bad writing that it was good." ~ William Saroyan

13. "The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith." ~ William Saroyan

14. "It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself." ~ William Saroyan

15. "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

16. "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

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

18. "This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said." ~ William Saroyan

19. "I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant" ~ William Saroyan

20. "I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia." ~ William Saroyan

21. "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case." ~ William Saroyan

22. "It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give." ~ William Saroyan

23. "I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it." ~ William Saroyan

24. "What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?" ~ William Saroyan

25. "Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes." ~ William Saroyan

26. "Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave." ~ William Saroyan

27. "Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure." ~ William Saroyan

28. "The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops." ~ William Saroyan

29. "The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited." ~ William Saroyan

30. "Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful." ~ William Saroyan

31. "The order I found was the order of disorder" ~ William Saroyan

32. "One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater." ~ William Saroyan

33. "When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die." ~ William Saroyan

34. "I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness." ~ William Saroyan

35. "I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things." ~ William Saroyan

36. "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." ~ William Saroyan

37. "Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers." ~ William Saroyan

38. "I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it." ~ William Saroyan

39. "I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful." ~ William Saroyan

40. "No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect." ~ William Saroyan

41. "To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book" ~ William Saroyan

42. "In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today." ~ William Saroyan

43. "Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them." ~ William Saroyan

44. "All of the sudden," he said, "I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for" ~ William Saroyan

45. "I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else-- and better too!" ~ William Saroyan

46. "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" ~ William Saroyan

47. "What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America." ~ William Saroyan

48. "There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth." ~ William Saroyan

49. "There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?" ~ William Saroyan

50. "He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see." ~ William Saroyan

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Sai, dove è scritto che per tutto c'è il suo tempo, c'è il suo momento per ogni cosa sotto il cielo. Un tempo per piangere e un tempo per ridere, un tempo per amare e un tempo per odiare, un tempo per cercare e un tempo per perdere" S'interruppe."Fidati, Charlie. La Bibbia per ogni si sbaglia. Nella vita di un uomo non c'è tempo per ogni cosa. Non c'è una stagione per ogni attività."( Ho sognato di te )"
Author: Ben Sherwood

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