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

Dear lady, … dear gentleman, reader, [it’s] not right … to put down this writer on his writing … And I’ll tell you why, too: it hurts, that’s why…. People try to understand why writers...

A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

What we want to do is keep from hindering. If it’s impossible to help, it’s always possible to hinder.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant

When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was hom

The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody’s best friend and only true enemy — the...

But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man...

I care so much about everything that I care about nothing

When I behold other people, who are of course the children of some family or other, and think of my own children, and of myself…I am astonished at how sensible, well-behaved, practical, courteous, and predictable...

But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the...

You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.

When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.

When you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.

I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn’t happiness.

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

The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.

You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party

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

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

All things lie dark in possibility.

I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.

Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the...

Whatever neutrality is, it is not very useful to anybody, and time is running out. If we do not do useful things whenever it is possible or necessary to do them, we shall soon be...

The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds,...

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

The purpose of art is to give the traveling human race an improved map that shows the way to itself. If art isn’t for *that*, what is it for?

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.