William Saroyan: Trending quotes (page 4)

“What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any.”

“Now, having a play on the same bill with a play by the one and only, the good and great, the impish and noble, the man and superman, George Bernard Shaw, is for me an honor, and I think a most fitting thing.”

“I did my best, and let me urge you to do your best, too. Isn't it the least we can do for one another?”

“The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?”

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

“It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.”

“All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.”

“There is only good and bad art.”

“This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.”

“A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead.”

“I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. 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. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity.”

“I have made a fiasco of my life, but I have had the right material to work with.”

“I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for food.”

“I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future.”

“My uncle jumped up from the desk, loving him more than he loved any other man in the world, and through him loving the lost nation, the multitude dead, and the multitude living in every alien corner of the world.”

“I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle.”