"My writing is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine alone, that no other writer could ever achieve."

William Saroyan Literature See all quotes by William Saroyan →

React to this quote

More by William Saroyan

“Nobody seemed to be interested in anything except making money.”

“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”

“Boredom was the plague of my childhood. While I was at the orphanage, the boredom came from being in a place I did not wish to be. I was bored. I was bored the entire four years I was there.”

“Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.”

“The bicycle is a city thing, virtually useless anywhere excepting on a pavement or hard surface of some kind. Without the road it would never have been invented. It is a little mad, both in design and purpose. Two wheels held together in a frame, with a simple mechanical system enabling a forward movement for one person.”

“To remember something or to invent something, it comes to the same thing.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I think what all nonfiction writers are aiming for is to make people think about things differently — to tell you a story from somewhere that, if you’re vaguely familiar with it, challenges what you t…"

— Elizabeth Kolbert

Literature1961

#writing

"he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the…"

— Richard Lewontin

Mathematics1929–2021

#writing

"For let us keep one fact clearly in mind: the German language was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism. It is not merely that a Hitler, a Goebbels, and a Himmler happened to speak German. Nazism foun…"

— George Steiner

Literature1929–2020

#writing

"f you have a Maxwell demon or something like a Szilard engine in, could you use it, as Maxwell envisaged, to use information to extract energy from De Sitter space and... do... useful work? ... only i…"

— Paul Davies

Science1946

#wisdom