Quotes from William Saroyan

Morning is best when it begins with the last hours of night. ...Enough of culture's hours. I am a peasant. Enough of feasting. I want hunger. Enough of fat. I want muscle. Enough of pity. I want humor. Enough of vanity. I want pride.

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

He's finding out, he's doing all right, he'll go to school but nobody's going to teach him anything.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.

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?

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

What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners…I want my children to be people– each one separate– each one special– each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others

The most interesting thing about the world is its fantastic and unpsychoanalyzed character, its wretched and gallant personality, its horrible idiocy and its magnificent intelligence, its unbelievable cruelty and its equally unbelievable kindness, its gorilla stupor, its canary cheerfulness, its thundering divinity, and its whimpering commonness.

I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?

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

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

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.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel. (- Saroyan, when once asked the name of his next book.)

There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.

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

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

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

When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was home

The Americans have found the healing of God in a variety of things, the most pleasant of which is probably automobile drives.

This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep.

Illness must be considered to be as natural as health.

This was such bad writing that it was good.

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn't for *that*, what is it for?