William Saroyan

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.

The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.

Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

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.

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

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happ'iness.

Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn’t know any better.

But who can speak to God, or rather who can’t? The question is, who can get an answer?

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.

The fraud delights my soul, and if he is big and clever and conceals his fraudulence for years, I am all the more impressed and entertained by his achievement.

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.

All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can

Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is i?i his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.

Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.

The only time you don't fail is the last time you try anything -- and it works.

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. What now?

Kids are always the only future the human race has.

A great book should leave you with many experiences and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;

Exercise your words. Try them out in new relationships.

You write because you want to be read.

Publication is not necessarily a sign of success.

Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make.… They make them for their own protection, and to hell with them.

Writing fails because the writer does not know enough about his material. If he knows enough he will feel enough.

Forward motion in any piece of writing is carried by verbs. Verbs are the action words of the language and the most important. Turn to any passage on any page of a successful novel and notice the high percentage of verbs. Beginning writers always use too many adjectives and adverbs and generally use too many dependent clauses. Count your words and words of verbal force (like that word “force” I just used).

The most solid advice … for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. 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.

The editor is a specialist about reading. His specialty is what is sufficiently general and common between a possible readership and what the author has to say. The tool he works with is himself. If the author cannot reach him, he can’t reach the editor’s readership either.

To write successful dialogue the author must have access to the mind of all his characters, but the reader must not perceive any more than he would in real life.