William Saroyan: Trending quotes

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William Saroyan: 380 quotes24 likes

“Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.”

William Saroyan

Of his father, who died in William's infancy.
I Used to Believe I Had Forever — Now I'm Not So Sure (1968)

“Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.”

William Saroyan

Something About a Soldier (1940)

“A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.”

William Saroyan The Time of Your Life

The Time of Your Life (1939)

“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.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable.”

William Saroyan

First Visit to Armenia (1935)

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

William Saroyan

Three Times Three (1936)

“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. Laughter 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.”

William Saroyan

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

“How did roses ever happen?”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.”

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

“What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.”

William Saroyan

"The Armenian Writers : A Short Story" (1954)

“Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.”

William Saroyan

"The Beggars" in The William Saroyan Reader (1958)

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

William Saroyan

Letter to Robert E. Sherwood (1946)

“There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.”

William Saroyan

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

“Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner.”

William Saroyan

Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961)

“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.”

William Saroyan

"One Day in the Afternoon of the World" (1964)

“If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language.”

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

“Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.”

William Saroyan

Memories of the Depression (1981)