Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by William Saroyan (American Playwright, Novelist)

William Saroyan (1908–81) was an Armenian-American playwright and novelist. He is celebrated for his work that came out during the Depression—bold, original, and irreverent stories with characters who celebrated the joy of living despite hardship, hunger, and uncertainty.

Born in Fresno, California, to parents who were recent refugees from the Turkish massacres in Armenia, Saroyan was primarily self-educated. He won literary acclaim with his first work, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934,) a volume of short stories; this proposed a hallucinatory but strikingly compassionate view of the U.S. during the Depression. Saroyan continued to produce unconventional and impressionistic stories published in collections such as the autobiographical My Name is Aram (1940.)

Idealistic and reluctant to commercialism, Saroyan refused the Pulitzer awarded in 1940 for his play The Time of Your Life (1939) by declaring, “Businessmen shouldn’t judge art.” Among his later works are many other plays and novels, including The Human Comedy (1943,) and the memoirs Places Where I’ve Done Time (1975) and Obituaries (1979.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Saroyan

The greatest happiness that you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Win, Now, Great, Happiness, Strength

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Competition

Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know… One who doesn’t try cannot fail and become wise.
—William Saroyan

Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Christmas

Be grateful for yourself… be thankful.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Blessings

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.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Self-Discovery

Doctors don’t know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in spirit.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Doctors

Love doesn’t have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Love

Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Day

I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unnecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Writing

The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Truth

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Life and Living

If this nation is going to survive meaningfully, and then perhaps grow decently, it has got to begin to know and accept enormous deprivation.
—William Saroyan
Topics: Problems

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