Quotes from William Saroyan

Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.

Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.

You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.

I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.

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

But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?

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.

Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.

Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.

You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party

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

No foundation. All the way down the line.

The manner in which a man chooses to gamble indicates his character or his lack of it.

If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is then no longer a thief.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.

Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.

Everybody's behind the eight-ball!

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, And when you laugh, laugh like hell, And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

When you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.