Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.
I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.
I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.
If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.
Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.
No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.
Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.
Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.
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.
Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers.
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.
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In the time of your life, live-so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.
Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.
Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.
Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
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.
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.
Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.
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.
Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
I love the bicycle. I always have. I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle.
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.
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.
To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book
The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.
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.
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.
In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."
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.
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.