William Saroyan:
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"The Beggars" in The William Saroyan Reader (1958)
Kontext: 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.
"The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze"
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934)
Kontext: Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace.
The Resurrection of a Life (1935)
Kontext: I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes. I see it as a large thing too, only I break it into small units of one man at a time, and see it as a large and monstrous thing for each man involved. I see the war as death in one form or another for men dressed as soldiers, and all the men who survived the war, including myself, I see as men who died with their brothers, dressed as soldiers. There is no such thing as a soldier. I see death as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and in the senses of one man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.
Hello Out There (1941)
Kontext: I have read books about the behavior of mobs — The Mob by Le Bon, if I remember rightly, was one — about the crime in children, and the genius in them, about the greatest bodies of things, and about the littlest of them. I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw.
“If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything.”
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), A Cold Day
Kontext: If you can't write a decent short story because of the cold, write something else. Write anything. Write a long letter to somebody.
Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang in Forever (1976)
Kontext: Jesus never said anything about absurdity, and he never indicated for one flash of time that he was aware of the preposterousness of his theory about himself. And he didn't even try to make the theory understandable in terms of the reality and experience of the rest of us. For if everybody else is also not what Jesus said he was, what good is what he said?
“You act as if you know more than I'll ever know, but I've forgotten more than you'll ever know.”
Jim Dandy : Fat Man in a Famine (1947)
Kontext: You act as if you know more than I'll ever know, but I've forgotten more than you'll ever know. You're snobs, too. Every man I've ever met has been a snob. You don't have to be a snob, too, do you? Please sign this piece of paper, so I can be a member of the public library and read books and find out about people. I don't want to hate you, I just can't help it.
“I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.”
Quelle: My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
“I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.”
Quelle: The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
“Everybody has to die, but I always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”
Statement to the Associated Press, five days before his death. (13 May 1981)
Quelle: Madness in the Family: Stories
“You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.”
William Saroyan
buch
The Human Comedy
Quelle: The Human Comedy
“We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.”
William Saroyan
buch
My Name Is Aram
"The Pomegranate Tree"
My Name Is Aram (1940)
“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.”
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
Kontext: Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.
Quelle: Not Dying: An Autobiographical Interlude
William Saroyan
buch
The Human Comedy
Quelle: The Human Comedy (1943)
Kontext: Death is not an easy thing for anyone to understand, least of all a child, but every life shall one day end. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us. His body can be taken, but not him. You shall know your father better as you grow and know yourself better. He is not dead, because you are alive. Time and accident, illness and weariness took his body, but already you have given it back to him, younger and more eager than ever. I don't expect you to understand anything I'm telling you. But I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
Madness in the Family (1988)
Quelle: Madness in the Family: Stories
“The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.”
As quoted at a Broadway memorial tribute to Saroyan, reported in The New York Times (31 October 1983)
“At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.”
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)
