William Saroyan citáty

page 4

„Každý človek na svete, dobrý alebo zlý, je podrobený skúškam.“

„Trápenie, trápenie, samé trápenie a vôkol stále samý smiech.“

„Nakoniec, dnešok je večný, včerajšok je ešte dnes a zajtrajšok je už dnes.“

„Je prirodzené, keď syn občas nenávidí otca a matku a niekedy i ostatných ľudí na svete.“

„Keby som bol diktátorom, zakázal by som zákonom požičiavanie kníh.“

„Dajte si čo najviac práce, aby ste skutočne žili.“

„Najväčšie šťastie, ktorého môžeme dosiahnuť, je poznanie, že šťastie nakoniec nie je nevyhnutne nutné.“

„Keď sa smeješ, smej sa ako peklo. A keď sa hneváš, hnevaj sa poriadne. Skúste žiť naplno, pretože čoskoro umrieš.“

“The end of life evokes the errors of it, and a fellow wishes he had known better.”

“I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inaccessible, inside all and careless of all.”

“My illness is life itself.”

“I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.”

“I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.”

“The idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.”

“Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that.
Young Shaw, hello out there.”

“Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.”

“My work is writing, but my real work is being.”

“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.”

“Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.”

“Art and politics must move closer together. Reflection and action must be equally valid in good men if history is not to take one course and art an other.”

“A play is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values.”

“I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.”

“I love Armenian people — all of them. I love them because they are a part of the enormous human race, which of course I find simultaneously beautiful and vulnerable.”

“Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.”

“I have always been a laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres… I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laughter to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.”

“How did roses ever happen?”

“I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.”

“Each person belongs to the environment, in his own person, as himself.”

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

“Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.”

“I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.”

“It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.”

“There is much for a young writer to learn from our poorest writers. It is very destructive to burn bad books, almost more destructive than to burn good ones.”

“Three times in my life I have been captured: by the orphanage, by school, and by the Army. I was four years in the orphanage, seven or eight in school, and three in the Army. Each seemed forever, though. But I'm mistaken. The fact is I was captured only once, when I was born, only that capture is also setting free, which is what this is actually all about. The free prisoner.”

“One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.”

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

“Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.”