Quotes from William Saroyan

We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.

I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?

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

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

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

Art is what is irresistible.

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

The order I found was the order of disorder

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.

I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

All things lie dark in possibility.

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

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.