William Saroyan
If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is no longer a thief.Collection: Giving
The order I found was the order of disorderCollection: Order
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.Collection: Sleep
Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.Collection: Christmas
What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?Collection: Moving
We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.Collection: Action
What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?Collection: Stupid
You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.Collection: Happens
The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?Collection: Hate
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Wise
Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Art
I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.Collection: Time
I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.Collection: Motivational
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.Collection: Running
If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.Collection: San Francisco
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.Collection: Art
It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Father
Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.Collection: Sunday
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.Collection: Children
If you're alive, you can't be bored in San Francisco. If you're not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life......San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day.Collection: Heart
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 othersCollection: Children
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.Collection: Daughter
One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Nice
Kids are always the only future the human race has.Collection: Life
People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be.Collection: People
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.Collection: Baby
My work is writing, but my real work is being.Collection: Real
Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.Collection: Love
Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.Collection: Soon Enough
I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.Collection: Wise
Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.Collection: Men
The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Typewriters
Nothing good ever ends.Collection: Ends
A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.Collection: Men
Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.Collection: Men
Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.Collection: Lying
I believe in anything that works.Collection: Believe
My work has always been the product of my time.Collection: Time
She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.Collection: Long Ago
No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.Collection: Heart
The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.Collection: Understanding