William Saroyan (1908 – 1981)
Armenian American author, famous for his novel The Human Comedy (1943), and other works dealing with the comedies and tragedies of everyday existence.
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
Many friendships are swift and accidental, the result of a chance meeting, followed by a permanent separation.
I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.
Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
When Andranik went away... I saw that tears were in his eyes and his mouth was twisting with agony like the mouth of a small boy who is in great pain but will not let himself cry.
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.
Merely to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive.
The boy on the Oakland porch goes to sleep upon the universe of ice and wakes up and remembers the death of his father and mother, and sees the sun.
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.
I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. 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. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity.
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
A man must pretend not to be a writer.
Nothing has ever been more sure-fire than truth and integrity.
Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.
My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve.
A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable.
It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.
I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know.