William Saroyan: Trending quotes (page 8)

“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.”

“I do not believe in races. I do not believe in governments.”

“My work has always been the product of my time.”

“The race was over. I was last, by ten yards. Without the slightest hesitation I protested and challenged the runners to another race, same distance, back. They refused to consider my proposal, which proved, I knew, that they were afraid to race me. I told them they knew very well I could beat them.”

“I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.”

“I was never interested in the obvious, or in the details one takes for granted, and everybody seemed to be addicted to the obvious, being astonished by it, and forever harping about the details which I had long ago weighted, measured, and discarded as irrelevant and useless. If you can measure it, don't. If you can weigh it, it isn't worth the bother. It isn't what you're after. It isn't going to get it. My wisdom was visual and as swift as vision. I looked, I saw, I understood, I felt, "That's that, where do we go from here?"”

“If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.”

“A man must pretend not to be a writer.”

“Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity.”

“Love of the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near I come to the truth.”

“I have been to the place, Armenia. There is no nation there, but that is all the better. But I have been to that place, and I know this: that there is no nation in the world, no England and France and Italy, and no nation whatsoever.”

“Everything begins with inhale and exhale, and never ends.”

“All things lie dark in possibility.”

“What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.”

“The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.”

“I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.”

“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.”

“Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”

“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.”