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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

“Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.”

William Saroyan

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

“Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“The business of polishing my shoes satisfies my soul.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today.”

William Saroyan

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

“Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.”

William Saroyan

The Resurrection of a Life (1935)

“The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun.”

William Saroyan

Obituaries (1979)

“The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real.”

William Saroyan

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

“The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.”

William Saroyan

Something About a Soldier (1940)

“I have been vitally aware of the Law of Opposites, and this awareness has kept me reasonably serene… the drama of life… the play of truth. the quarrel of fools and frauds, male and female, the classic and the romantic, the disciplined and the free… the comic and the tragic contrasting of the opposites in all areas of possibility and on and on and on.”

William Saroyan

Obituaries (1979)

“I was four years old, and had long since reasoned that it was folly to expect the big things from people. It was enough to get the little things. The biggest thing, of course, was love, the nearness of somebody you love when you need somebody to be near.”

William Saroyan

Places Where I've Done Time (1972)

“Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.”

William Saroyan

Little Children (1937)

“It is better to be a good human being than to be a bad one. It is just naturally better.”

William Saroyan

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

“One of us is obviously mistaken.”

William Saroyan

To a critic who had panned his latest play, in The New York Mirror (10 June 1960)

“Be, beget, begone.”

William Saroyan

Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)

“Cowards are the nicest people, the most interesting, the gentlest, the most refined, the least likely to commit crimes.”

William Saroyan

Madness in the Family (1988)

“The bicycle is a city thing, virtually useless anywhere excepting on a pavement or hard surface of some kind. Without the road it would never have been invented. It is a little mad, both in design and purpose. Two wheels held together in a frame, with a simple mechanical system enabling a forward movement for one person.”

William Saroyan

Madness in the Family (1988)

“Going around the world on a bicycle is no longer enough -- the daredevil has got to go around the moon on a Pogo stick with one arm tied behind him if he wants to get his picture in the paper.”

William Saroyan

Madness in the Family (1988)