Saroyan Quotes

#1. Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#2. My cup is yellow
Or not, though not's
Impossible
It's yellow #Quote by Aram Saroyan

#3. There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#4. All I can say is that there is indeed a crisis here. We cannot speak to one another in a meaningful way, every one of us is a leader, a general of the army, a king, a president, the greatest thinker of all time, and so on and so forth. This is the curse of the Armenian race. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#5. Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#6. Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#7. The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#8. Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#9. The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#10. 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? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#11. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#12. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#13. Nothing good ever ends. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#14. My work is writing, but my real work is being. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#15. This sense of being out of time has driven thousands of people from their homes into moving-picture theaters where new universes appear before them, with emphasis on man and his major problem: a thing called, conveniently, love. The Sunday midnight shows do a thriving business, and the people go back to their homes, sick with the sickness of frustration; it is this that makes the city so interesting at night: the people emerging from the theaters, smoking cigarettes and looking desperate, wanting much, the precision, the glory, all the loveliness of life: wanting what is finest and getting nothing. It is saddening to see them, but there is mockery in the heart: one walks among them, laughing at oneself and at them, their midnight staring. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#16. In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#17. 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 #Quote by William, Saroyan

#18. A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#19. Give me something about bacteria. Give me something that won't make me feel so inferior #Quote by William, Saroyan

#20. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#21. 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? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#22. Once he saw a young girl with a small black satchel descend from a train, and she seemed so lonely and frightened that he wanted to shout to her and run down to her and smile and tell her, My name is Joe Silvera. I was born in this town, but I went away when I was seventeen and stayed away seven years. I've been back four months. I live across the street. I'm a painter. Come on up to my place and rest; I've got some wine.
All he did, though, was stare at her, and finally when she disappeared, walking down Tulare Street, he wanted very much, even then, to run down to the street and catch up with her; and a day later he wanted to look for her all over town; and a week later he wondered where she might be. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#23. This was such bad writing that it was good. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#24. It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#25. This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#26. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#27. 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? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#28. In every house there ought to be an art table on which, one by one, things are placed, so that everybody in that house might look at the things very carefully, and see them.'
'What would you put on a table like that?'
'A leaf. A coin. A button. A stone. A small piece of torn newspaper. An apple. An egg. A pebble. A flower. A dead insect. A shoe.'
'Everybody's seen those things.'
'Of course. But nobody looks at them, and that's what art is. To look at familiar things as if they had never before been seen ... A necktie. A pocketknife ... a walnut. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#29. I watch the growth of spirit in the children who come to my class. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#30. I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us
from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#31. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#32. When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#33. Be grateful for yourself ... be thankful. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#34. The order I found was the order of disorder #Quote by William, Saroyan

#35. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. #Quote by 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#37. He was under the impression that he belonged wherever there was something interesting to see. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#38. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#39. Kids are always the only future the human race has. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#40. What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#41. Live, for this is the time of your life. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#42. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#43. When I behold other people, who are of course the children of some family or other, and think of my own children, and of myself...I am astonished at how sensible, well-behaved, practical, courteous, and predictable these other children are. The other children are so easy about the whole business of being who they are, being in the world, and getting along. Whereas with us it is an awful fight, all the way.

I am left with the conclusion that we are quite probably crazy, but somehow not in a way that compels commitment. We get over our rampages before society or clinical insanity charges in on us. I can think of very few of us who are not nuts. And that's not at our worst, that's pretty much as we always are. We find fault with everything. The world stinks, and even long after we have reconciled ourselves to that truth, we still regret it, and now and then even rage against it. Running through the various branches of the family I fail to find one branch which might be said to be nice- ordinary, sober, adjusted, willing, courteous, undemanding, charming, practical, predictable, and all of the other things nice people are. Lunacy runs straight down the middle of every branch of my family. We have nobody who is not some kind of nut. What did it? How did it happen? Well, there's no answer, of course. #Quote by William Saroyan

#44. The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#45. I know you will remember this - that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world - no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#46. What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it's impossible to help, it's always possible to hinder. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#47. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#48. I thought a fellow would never cry when he got to be grown up, but it seems as if that's when a fellow starts, because that's when a fellow starts finding out about things. #Quote by William Saroyan

#49. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#50. I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#51. Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#52. The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#53. Now, what is food? Why is food so important? Why do human beings need so much of it - three times a day, every day, year after year? Why do they live on food instead of on something else? Wouldn't it be better if human beings didn't need food at all? Wouldn't it be better if they could live on air, for instance? Get stronger and bigger by breathing sea air, or the air of the mountains, or the forests, or the meadows, or the vineyards and orchards, the wheat fields, the gardens all over the world? Wouldn't that be a better way for men to stay alive?
(spoken by 10-year-old Aram Saroyan) #Quote by William, Saroyan

#54. You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party #Quote by William, Saroyan

#55. I wanted to know her the way a bee wants to know a great bright flower. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#56. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#57. Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#58. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#59. ...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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#60. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#61. I discovered John Fante when I was 17 years old - strangely, not through Charles Bukowski, but through William Saroyan, who was his drinking buddy. #Quote by Jonathan Evison

#62. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#63. What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#64. Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee
that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life
live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition. #Quote by Tennessee Williams

#65. If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#66. I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#67. Hemingway and Saroyan had the line, the magic of it. The problem was that Hemingway didn't know how to laugh and Saroyan was filled with sugar. #Quote by Charles Bukowski

#68. San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#69. I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#70. Be, beget, begone. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#71. Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#72. I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else
and better too! #Quote by William, Saroyan

#73. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#74. Love is immortal and makes all things immortal. But hate dies every minute. #Quote by Saroyan William

#75. I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#76. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#77. I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#78. The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#79. 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? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#80. In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#81. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#82. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#83. Who can think of Larkin now without considering his fondness for the buttocks of schoolgirls and paranoid hatred of blacks ... Or Eric Gill's copulations with more or less every member of his family, including the dog? Proust had rats tortured, and donated his family furniture to brothels; Dickens walled up his wife and kept her from her children; Lillian Hellman lied. While Sartre lived with his mother, Simone de Beauvoir pimped babes for him; he envied Camus, before trashing him. John Cheever loitered in toilets, nostrils aflare, before returning to his wife. P.G. Wodehouse made broadcasts for the Nazis; Mailer stabbed his second wife. Two of Ted Hughes's lovers had killed themselves. And as for Styron, Salinger, Saroyan ... Literature was a killing field; no decent person had ever picked up a pen. #Quote by Hanif Kureishi

#84. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#85. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#86. Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#87. Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#88. At the corner she looked suddenly far away and saw the street go straight out to the sky. She looked up to the sky and saw it go everywhere, and my, she thought, how large it is, what a large place it is. What a large world. So many different people, so many different places, close by and far away, people everywhere, places everywhere. What a fine place to be in. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#89. Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#90. everybody loves a poet
a poet loves everybody #Quote by Aram Saroyan

#91. You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#92. The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#93. You must remember always to give, of everything you have. You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have to give. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#94. I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
(- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.) #Quote by William, Saroyan

#95. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#96. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#97. The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#98. Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#99. Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#100. The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#101. Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#102. It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#103. Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#104. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#105. The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#106. The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#107. The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#108. Zombies have got to do a lot of hanging around together
weaklings, liars, cheaters. Everybody respects them these days, everybody thinks that if they don't respect them it means they're against civil liberties or something, but I can only sympathize with them a little, but only a little; I can't respect them, they bore me
their everlasting bawling about their tricky little sadnesses and deprivations of childhood bore me. You've introduced me to some of the people you know. I don't dislike any of them, but I really can't pretend I believe in any of them, or that they don't bore me. And in being critical of them of course I'm being critical of you, too, at least for having them as friends. There are other people around, too, you know, not just the ones who start by giving up, and then just hang around to see what giving up leads to. It leads to being a zombie of one sort or another. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#109. She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#110. And in the end you will realise that everything you did, you did for you and for the people like you ... #Quote by Nrane Saroyan

#111. 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)) #Quote by William, Saroyan

#112. I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#113. Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#114. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#115. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#116. I love the bicycle. I always have. I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#117. What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#118. But, it didn't matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the world as a family. In those days, also, it was unheard of, by us certainly, that to get any help, even from members of our own family, let alone from the government, which would have been disgraceful. Thank God that that kind of folly in thinking is obsolete. There is a temptation to feel, 'Well, we all made it; why can't these other poor people make it?' And, of course, nothing is more than stupid than that attitude. I must confess that I find that attitude among many countrymen of my own who do find themselves taking undue pride in their own sense of ability - of being equal to any situation, and of seeing it through and improving it, and so on. And then, putting that against other people who don't have that, and thereby implying that the other people are lazy. Not taking into account the whole different structure and identity and a people who have survived for centuries under very harsh conditions and members of a very great culture, and I am talking about the Indians, to begin with, in the Valley - the San Joaquin Valley, in Fresno, in Tulare, and the mountains, and there are many tribes of them, of different kinds, and I am talking about, also, the Mestizos, the mixtures of Mexican, Spaniards with Indians, making the Mexican. And I am talking about any minority which is considered by anybody as bein #Quote by William Saroyan

#119. I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#120. But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer? #Quote by William, Saroyan

#121. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#122. Let your soul go wherever it wants and it certainly takes you with him #Quote by Nrane Saroyan

#123. if a man is an honest idiot. i can love him. but i cannot love a dishonest genius #Quote by William Saroyan

#124. 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)) #Quote by William, Saroyan

#125. There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#126. Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids - from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream - is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#127. Art is what is irresistible. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#128. Think before you speak, think twice before you shout, think three times before you go mad. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#129. 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 #Quote by William Saroyan

#130. Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#131. You write a hit play the same way you write a flop #Quote by William, Saroyan

#132. We get very little wisdom from success, you know. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#133. We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#134. 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. #Quote by William, Saroyan

#135. If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language. #Quote by William, Saroyan