Quotes from William Saroyan

There is no real freedom for the man who is in so much of a hurry that he is annoyed by the human race and by the hot glaring afternoon sun.

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

I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all.

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.

Each of you will begin to be truly human when, in spite of your natural dislike of one another, you still respect one another. That is what it means to be civilized.

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. (The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952))

I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class.

if a man is an honest idiot. i can love him. but i cannot love a dishonest genius

He got up and stalked out of the house, slamming the screen door. My mother explained. He has a gentle heart, she said. It is simply that he is homesick and such a large man.

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 want time in which to walk quietly over the earth, among uncrazed men. I want time in which to build a house, inhabit it, create a past with meaning. I want time in which to seek and find love. I want time. I want to be unhurried, uncaught. I want time in which to sleep and waken, in which to dream the truth of my being on earth. Time.

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

Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men. (Something About a Soldier (1940))

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

How can you talk if you don't say anything? I said. You talk without words. We are always talking without words. Well, what good are words, then? Not very good, most of the time. Most of the time they're only good to keep back what you really want to say, or something you don't want known.

Whatever neutrality is, it is not very useful to anybody, and time is running out. If we do not do useful things whenever it is possible or necessary to do them, we shall soon be totally departed from the human scene, and forgotten, or remembered only for having disappeared. Armenians are too vital to be permitted to throw themselves away in neutrality, comfort, well-being, satisfaction, and so on and so forth.

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.

What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder.

As for the matter of what we may expect from one another, that is indeed something we are eager to learn - all of us, all our lives, but I wonder, do we ever learn, do we ever really find out?

Eating cherries on a hot July afternoon in Michigan is one of the greatest things that can happen to anybody, and here it is right now - three minutes after three - happening to ME, and to you.

The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy—the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.

Everything is changed for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the world has always been full of that loneliness.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

Think before you speak, think twice before you shout, think three times before you go mad.