274 Quotes by William Saroyan

You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.

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.

I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.

The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?

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.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.

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 stops

I have never received a telephone call that justified the excitement and fuss of the electronics involved. If I can't see somebody I love, for instance, such as a daughter, or a son, I would rather receive a letter.