Top 150 Quotes & Sayings by William Saroyan - Page 2

Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there's no game, there's no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation at all. It is good to care - in any dimension. More Americans put their caring into baseball than into anything else I can think of - and most put at least a little of it there. Baseball can be trusted, as great art can, and bad art can't.

I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?

It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.

Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.

Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Nothing good ever ends.

The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.

I have never received a telephone call that justified the excitement and fuss of the electronics involved. If I can't see somebody I love, for instance, such as a daughter, or a son, I would rather receive a letter.

I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.

I believe in anything that works.

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

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?

I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.

Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.

You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.

Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.

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.

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?

The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?

Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.

Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

My work is writing, but my real work is being.

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.

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.

Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.

All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.

The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.

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

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

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.

We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.

Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.

If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.

Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.

Art is what is irresistible.

I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.

To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book

People are people. Don't be afraid of them.

Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.

People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be.

Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.

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

All things lie dark in possibility.

Whoever the kid had been, whoever had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: "You just change your attitude now please, young man." This transformation in kids - from flashing dragonflies, so to say, to sticky water-surface worms slowly slipping downstream - is noticed with pride by society and with mortification by God, which is a fantastic way of saying I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.

Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers.

I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else-- and better too!

Everything alive is part of each of us, and many things which do not move as we move are part of us. The sun is part of us, the earth, the sky, the stars, the rivers, and the oceans. All things are part of us, and we have come here to enjoy them and to thank God for them.

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.

My work has always been the product of my time.

What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?

It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.

I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.

I love the bicycle. I always have. I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle.