William Saroyan: Man

William Saroyan was American writer. Explore interesting quotes on man.
William Saroyan: 380 quotes24 likes

“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)

“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 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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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).

“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)