"The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited."

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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

"The capitalist class is represented by the Republican, Democratic, Populist and Prohibition parties, all of which stand for private ownership of the means of production, and the triumph of any one of …"

— Eugene V. Debs

Politics1855–1926

#art

"As an artistic style, mannerism conformed to a divided outlook on life which was, nevertheless, spread uniformly all over Western Europe; the baroque is the expression of an intrinsically more homogen…"

— Arnold Hauser (art historian)

Philosophy1892–1978

#art

"Like most philosophers, Kant worked to shore up the conventional beliefs of his time. Schopenhauer did the opposite. Accepting the arguments of Hume and Kant that the world is unknowable, he concluded…"

— John Gray (philosopher)

Philosophy1948

#philosophy

"There is one point more which has been troubling me very much of late and one which I want you to think carefully and that is the question of Hindu-Mohamedan unity. I have devoted most of my time duri…"

— Lala Lajpat Rai

Politics1865–1928

#truth