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.
It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers.
All writers are discontent. That’s because they’re aware of a potential and believe they’re not reaching it.
I love the bicycle. I always have. I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle.
I used to throw things out, saying, ‘This isn’t great.’ It didn’t occur to me that it didn’t have to be great.
Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.
Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
A man’s ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
Art is what is irresistible.
I don’t think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
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.
Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.
The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.
Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.
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.
Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
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.
The Tax Collector’s letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven’t paid him.