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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.

William Saroyan

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William Saroyan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 31
Died: 1981
Died: May 18
Dramatist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Fresno
California
Health
Ill
Age
Escape
Natural
Inevitable
Unimportance
Writing
Madness
Uselessness
Things
Despair
Insignificance
Early
Enslavement
Took
Unattractive
Poverty
Manner

More quotes by William Saroyan

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The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
William Saroyan
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Babies who have not yet been taught to speak any language are the only race of the earth, the race of man: all the rest is pretence, what we call civilization, hatred, fear, desire for strength.
William Saroyan
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Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.
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What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
William Saroyan
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Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.
William Saroyan
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I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
William Saroyan
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Nothing good ever ends.
William Saroyan
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I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.
William Saroyan
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I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.
William Saroyan
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I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
William Saroyan
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But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
William Saroyan
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What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
William Saroyan
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To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book
William Saroyan
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If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is no longer a thief.
William Saroyan
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You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.
William Saroyan
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Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.
William Saroyan
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The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan
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I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.
William Saroyan