William Saroyan
I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?Collection: War
We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.Collection: Say Anything
It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.Collection: Life
Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.Collection: Health
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.Collection: America
Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.Collection: Children
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.Collection: Care
The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.Collection: Cycling
The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.Collection: World
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.Collection: Cancer
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 stopsCollection: Spiritual
No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.Collection: Enemy
Live, for this is the time of your life.Collection: Time Of Your Life
What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Hurt
I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Land
My birthplace was California, but I couldn't forget Armenia, so what is one's country? Is it land of the earth, in a specific place? Rivers there? Lakes? The sky there? The way the moon comes up there? And the sun? Is one's country the trees, the vineyards, the grass, the birds, the rocks, the hills and summer and winter? Is it the animal rhythm of the living there? The huts and houses, the streets of cities, the tables and chairs, and the drinking of tea and talking? Is it the peach ripening in summer heat on the bough? Is it the dead in the earth there?Collection: Summer
All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another.Collection: Dirty
I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.Collection: People
I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Thinking
Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.Collection: Intelligent
What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?Collection: Running
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?Collection: Men
The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?Collection: Mad
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.Collection: Wise
All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.Collection: Writing
The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.Collection: Letters
San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.Collection: Heart
The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.Collection: Song
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.Collection: Writing
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.Collection: Lonely
Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.Collection: Swimming
What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.Collection: Silence
I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.Collection: Time
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.Collection: Students
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.Collection: Feelings
The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.Collection: Events
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.Collection: Cancer
Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met.Collection: Greatness
I can't decide for you whether or not you have got to write, but if anything in the world, war, or pestilence, or famine, or private hunger, or anything, can stop you from writing, then don't write . . . because if anything can even begin to keep you from writing you aren't a writer and you'll be in a hell of a mess until you find out. If you are a writer, you'll still be in a hell of a mess, but you'll have better reasons.Collection: War
Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Clever
Whoever the kid had been, whoever had 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.Collection: Teacher
All of the sudden," he said, "I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely forCollection: Lonely
There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.Collection: Vanity
Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.Collection: Writing