William Saroyan: Trending quotes

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William Saroyan: 380 quotes24 likes

“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

The Assyrians (1950)

“The streets made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire.”

William Saroyan

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day

“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

Inhale and Exhale (1936), Antranik and the Spirit of Armenia

“Art is what is irresistible.”

William Saroyan

Statement to William Bolcom, quoted in "The End of the Mannerist Century" (2004) by William Bolcom, in The Pleasure of Modernist Music edited by Arved Ashby ISBN 1580461433

“I had long known that there was something about me that was either violent or frightening for some reason. In certain three-sided clothing store images I had for some years come upon myself, with shock and disbelief, regret, and shame, disappointment and despair, for I am indeed clearly violent, mad, and ugly, all because of intensity of some kind, a tension, an obsession with getting everything that there was to be got, a passion, an insanity.”

William Saroyan

Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever (1976)

“The purpose of my life is to put off dying as long as possible.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“It seemed to me that I had no right to burn a book I hadn't even read.”

William Saroyan

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day

“Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.”

William Saroyan book The Human Comedy

The Human Comedy (1943)

“Illness is essentially discomfort, and it is not easy for anybody to be comfortable all the time… in his body, in his work, in his house, or in his soul.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“In those days, there was something more to the world than there is now. Well, my kids were little, let's put it that way, and 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.”

William Saroyan

Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961)

“The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“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, inaccessible, inside all and careless of all.”

William Saroyan

Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961)

“My illness is life itself.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.”

William Saroyan

As quoted in "Saroyan's Literary Quarantine" by Peter H. King, in The Los Angeles Times (26 March 1997).

“I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.”

William Saroyan

Hello Out There (1941)

“The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.”

William Saroyan

Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever (1976)

“Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that.
Young Shaw, hello out there.”

William Saroyan

In the The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952) Saroyan additionally wrote of Shaw:
He was a gentle, delicate, kind, little man who had established a pose, and then lived it so steadily and effectively that the pose had become real. Like myself, his nature has been obviously a deeply troubled one in the beginning. He had been a man who had seen the futility, meaninglessness and sorrow of life but had permitted himself to thrust aside these feelings and to perform another George Bernard Shaw, which is art and proper.
Hello Out There (1941)

“Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

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

William Saroyan

Obituaries (1979)