William Saroyan on Time

"There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?"

"The only thing I can talk about is the cold because it is the only thing going on today."

"In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today."

"I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich."

"I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me."

"There was a touch of anxiety in the whole human race about its future."

"I was an old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco, because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the soul travels farthest and swiftest."

"My work has always been the product of my time."

"The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art — that is, the meaningful-real."

"I was afraid I might actually know him, might have known him, one of perhaps three hundred Fresno boys I had known thirty years ago, because if I *did* know him, I would have to make something of it, and this just wasn't the time for it."

"In those days, there was something more to the world than there is now. Well, my kids were little, let's put it that way, and of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again."

"Every man alive in the world is a beggar of one sort or another, every last one of them, great and small. The priest begs God for grace, and the king begs something for something. Sometimes he begs the people for loyalty, sometimes he begs God to forgive him. No man in the world can have endured ten years without having begged God to forgive him."

"When I was fifteen and had quit school forever, I went to work in a vineyard near Sanger with a number of Mexicans, one of whom was only a year or two older than myself, an earnest boy named Felipe. One gray, dismal, cold, dreary day in January, while we were pruning muscat vines, I said to this boy, simply in order to be talking, "If you had your wish, Felipe, what would you want to be? A doctor, a farmer, a singer, a painter, a matador, or what?" Felipe thought a minute, and then he said, "Passenger." This was exciting to hear, and definitely something to talk about at some length, which we did. He wanted to be a passenger on anything that was going anywhere, but most of all on a ship."