155 quotes
I don't like to see kids throw away their truth just because it isn't worth a dime in the open market.
The Flashing Dragonfly (1973)
Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?
He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship.
The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is.
The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
Inhale and Exhale (1936)
The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.
Memories of the Depression (1981)
Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small.
The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
Chance Meetings (1978)
The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.
Seventy Thousand Assyrians (1934)
Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
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.
One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964)
We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
My Name Is Aram (1940)
I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.
Little Children (1937)
All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Don't forget that some things count more than other things.
All things lie dark in possibility.
Baby (1936)
I have read Schopenhauer at the age of twelve with no bewilderment and no contempt of his contempt for the world and its strange inhabitants, and no contempt for the strange inhabitant himself.
Hello Out There (1941)
He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.
The William Saroyan Reader (1958)