Quote

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

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
Write
Play
Writing
Way
Flop
Irony

More quotes by William Saroyan

Image
Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.
William Saroyan
Image
What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners...I want my children to be people- each one separate- each one special- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
William Saroyan
Image
I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.
William Saroyan
Image
What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
William Saroyan
Image
The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.
William Saroyan
Image
Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
William Saroyan
Image
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
Image
All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
William Saroyan
Image
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.
William Saroyan
Image
Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.
William Saroyan
Image
I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
William Saroyan
Image
I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.
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
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.
William Saroyan