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William Saroyan Quotes
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William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film adaptation of his novel The Human Comedy.

Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works are The Time of Your Life, My Name Is Aram and My Heart's in the Highlands.

He has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century" and by Stephen Fry as "one of the most underrated writers of the [20th] century." Fry suggests that "he takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner." Wikipedia  

✵ 31. August 1908 – 18. May 1981
William Saroyan photo
William Saroyan: 190 quotes24 likes

William Saroyan Quotes

“One nickel, one secret. No exchanges, no refunds.”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“I had three secrets and sold them all.”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“We know more than we need to know.”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“This is a big statement and it sounds a little precious. Generally a man is ashamed to make such a statement. He is afraid sophisticated people will laugh at him. But I don't mind. I'm asking sophisticated people to laugh. That is what sophistication is for.”

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

“When Andranik went away… I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry.”

William Saroyan

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

“Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way.”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“He was just a young man who'd come to town on a donkey, bored to death or something, who'd taken advantage of the chance to be entertained by a small-town kid who was bored to death, too. That's the only way I could figure it out without accepting the general theory that he was crazy.”

William Saroyan

"Locomotive 38, the Ojibway" (1940)

“If the great one found out about my fight with Death, and came to be near me, what good things we might all expect from being in the world. and then around daybreak I knew I had come through, and now at last fell into real sleep — alone, and proud, and alive — now more alive than ever.”

William Saroyan

Places Where I've Done Time (1972)

“All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.”

William Saroyan

Three Times Three (1936)

“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.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.”

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

“Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong.”

William Saroyan book The Human Comedy

The Human Comedy (1943)

“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.”

William Saroyan

"The Declaration of War" (1944)

“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.”

William Saroyan

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

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

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

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

William Saroyan

Something About a Soldier (1940)

“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.”

William Saroyan

"The Fifty Yard Dash" (1940)

“I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“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?"”

William Saroyan

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Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961)

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

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

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

William Saroyan

Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)

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

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

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

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“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.”

William Saroyan

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

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

William Saroyan

The Resurrection of a Life (1935)

“All things lie dark in possibility.”

William Saroyan

"Baby" (1936)

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

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

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

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

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

William Saroyan

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

“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.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

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

William Saroyan

"Locomotive 38, the Ojibway" (1940)

“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.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“I began to visit Armenia as soon as I had earned the necessary money.”

William Saroyan

First Visit to Armenia (1935)

“The world was my home and I was glad to be in it.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I have read Schopenhauer at the age of twelve with no bewilderment and no contempt of his contempt for the world and its strange inhabitants, and no contempt for the strange inhabitant himself.”

William Saroyan

Hello Out There (1941)

“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?”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.”

William Saroyan

Something About a Soldier (1940)

“This was such bad writing that it was good.”

William Saroyan

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

“I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“I believe in my work and am eager for others to know about it.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“He knew the truth and was looking for something better.”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“Poetry must be read to be poetry. It may be that one reader is all that I deserve. If this is so, I want that reader to be you.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“Standing at the edge of our city, a man could feel that we had made this place of streets and dwellings in the stillness of the desert, and that we had done a brave thing… Or a man could feel that we had made this city in the desert and that it was a fake thing and that our lives were empty lives, and that we were the contemporaries of the jack rabbits.”

William Saroyan

As quoted in "Saroyan's Literary Quarantine" http://www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan_2.html by Peter H. King, in The Los Angeles Times (26 March 1997).