5 William Saroyan Quotes on Character

William Saroyan quotes on character

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

120. Jim Dandy waves his stick over and around about the rock in a meaningless-meaningful way.

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

158. I liked Charentz straight off, but more important than this was the feeling that I had that he was a truly great man. Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met. Charentz seemed great to me, I think, because he was made of a mixture of proud virtues and amusing flaws. On the one hand, his independence of spirit was balanced by a humorous worldliness, his acute intelligence by a curiosity that frequently made him seem naive, his profoundly gentle manners by a kind of mocking mischievousness which might easily be mistaken for rudeness. But he was never rude, he was witty, and the purpose of his wit was to keep himself from the terrible condition of pomposity.

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