William Saroyan Men Quotations

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.

I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.

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.

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.

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

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

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?

There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.

I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.

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

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

It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.

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

Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.

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

I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.

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

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

It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops

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

Unless a man has pity he is not truly a man. If a man has not wept at the worlds pain he is only half a man, and there will always be pain in the world, knowing this does not mean that a man shall dispair. A good man will seek to take pain out of things. A foolish man will not even notice it, except in himself, and the poor unfortunate evil man will drive pain deeper into things and spread it about wherever he goes.

Despise evil and un godliness but not men of un godliness or evil.

I used to be the fastest telegram messenger boy in all Fresno. My nickname was "Speed." Finally, I said, "Take back your nickname. This pace is killing me." Anyway, I still write fast -- it's my impatient Armenian nature. I'm keen to find out how my plots end, and if I write faster I'll find out sooner.