William Saroyan Quotes on Art
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The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
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Art is what is irresistible.
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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.
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This was such bad writing that it was good.
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It is the heart of man that I am trying to imply in this work.
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This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
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A man must pretend not to be a writer.
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All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
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Go ahead. Fire your feeble guns. You won't kill anything. There will always be poets in the world.
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There is only good and bad art.
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Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.
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Art can no longer afford to be contemptuous of politics, and it appears to be time politics took a little instruction from art.
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The weakness of art is that great poems do not ennoble politics, as they certainly should, and the trouble with politics is that they inspire poets only to mockery and scorn.
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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.
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Wars, for us, are either inevitable, or created. Whatever they are, they should not wholly vitiate art. What art needs is greater men, and what politics needs is better men.
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Art and religion would not be able to stop the war any more than they would be able to stop tomorrow.
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My work has always been the product of my time.
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Now, having a play on the same bill with a play by the one and only, the good and great, the impish and noble, the man and superman, George Bernard Shaw, is for me an honor, and I think a most fitting thing.
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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.
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Their singing wasn't particularly good, but the feeling with which they sang was not bad at all.
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I had in my soul the greatest truths to tell, but when I came to the work of telling them I couldn't do it.
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A man cannot write a poem or a story that will transform the whole nature of man, his reality and his truth, making them greater and nobler.
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I loved the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for food.
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At his best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them.
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The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as 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.
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He paints for the blind, and we are the blind, and he lets us see for sure what we saw long ago but weren't sure we saw. He paints for the dead, to remind us that - great good God, think of it - we're alive, and on our way to weather, from the sea to the hot interior, to watermelon there, a bird at night chasing a child past flowering cactus, a building on fire, barking dogs, and guitar-players not playing at eight o'clock, every picture saying, 'Did you live, man? Were you alive back there for a little while? Good for you, good for you, and wasn't it hot, though? Wasn't it great when it was hot, though?'
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A great man for the arts should be celebrated not because of the past, but for the future.