Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and 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.

Saroyan’s exhortation is a characteristically exuberant, anti-pretentious call to intensity of feeling and presence. Rather than advocating constant happiness, it urges full engagement with the whole range of human emotion—laughter and anger alike—because emotional vividness is part of being “wholly alive.” The blunt reminder of mortality (“You will be dead soon enough”) frames life as brief and nonrepeatable, making half-measures and emotional timidity seem like a kind of self-erasure. The quote also reflects Saroyan’s broader humanism: ordinary life, honestly felt, is worthy of total participation, and authenticity matters more than decorum.