William Saroyan on Writing

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

"If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody."

"I couldn't understand the language, I couldn't understand a word in the whole book, but it was somehow too eloquent to use for a fire."

"A writer wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to be heard after he is dead."

"Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world."

"We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in."

"What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America."

"My superficial manners stink and my profound manners are almost as bad."

"What I intended to do was to burn a half dozen of my books and keep warm, so that I could write my story, but when I looked around for titles to burn, I couldn't find any."

"I am out here in the far West, in San Francisco, in a small room on Carl Street, writing a letter to common people, telling them in simple language what they already know."

"If I want to do anything, I want to speak a more universal language."

"A prudent man does not open an umbrella for one drop of rain."

"A man must pretend not to be a writer."

"You write a hit play the same way you write a flop."

"I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little."

"This was such bad writing that it was good."

"William Saroyan : The Man, The Writer"

"In order to write all a man needs is paper and a pencil. Furthermore, when a thing has been written, it is written forever. When it is printed, nothing can stop it from being printed again and again if the thing wants to be printed again and again. I must therefore be a writer."

"I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle."