Quote

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.

William Saroyan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Saroyan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 31
Died: 1981
Died: May 18
Dramatist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Fresno
California
White
Typewriter
Typewriters
Plot
Add
Paper
Novel
Name
Names

More quotes by William Saroyan

Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
I believe in anything that works.
William Saroyan
Image
All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
William Saroyan
Image
The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.
William Saroyan
Image
Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.
William Saroyan
Image
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
William Saroyan
Image
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
William Saroyan
Image
Whoever the kid had been, whoever had had the grand attitude, has finally heeded the admonishment of parents, teachers, governments, religions, and the law: )You just change your attitude now please, young man.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.
William Saroyan
Image
I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.
William Saroyan