William Saroyan

If I have any desire at all, it is to show the brotherhood of man.

You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.

You abandon most readily those works that have no destination other than your own wishes; there is no editor or producer standing there waiting for them... I've told every young writer I know to do the job all the way through even if they think it's no good. Then they'll have the precedent of having finished work.

In getting from Windsor to Detroit there is a choice between a free tunnel and a toll bridge, which turned out to be a short ride for a dollar, which I mentioned to the toll-collector who said, 'One of those things,' impelling me to remark to my cousin, 'Almost everything said by people one sees for only an instant is something like poetry. Precise, incisive, and just right, and the reason seems to be that there isn't time to talk prose. This suggests several things, the most important of which is probably that a writer ought not to permit himself to feel that he has all the time in the world in which to write his story or play or novel. He ought to set himself a time-limit, and the shorter the better. And he ought to do a lot of other things while he is working within this time-limit, so that he will always be under pressure, in a hurry, and therefore have neither the inclination nor the time to be fussy, which is the worst thing that happens to a book while it's being written.

"Future?" Homer said. He was a little embarrassed because all his life, from day to day, he had been busy mapping out a future, even if it was only a future for the next day. "Well," he said, "I don't know for sure, but I guess I'd like to be somebody some day."

Writing is the hardest way of earning a living with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.

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

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

The order I found was the order of disorder

You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.

I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.

She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.

Eating cherries on a hot July afternoon in Michigan is one of the greatest things that can happen to anybody, and here it is right now - three minutes after three - happening to ME, and to you.

But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.

This is a hell of a night. I don't want to leave it just to go to sleep.