William Saroyan Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“One of us is obviously mistaken.”

“Be, beget, begone.”

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

“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.”

“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.”