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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
Inevitable
Unimportance
Natural
Madness
Uselessness
Writing
Despair
Insignificance
Things
Early
Enslavement
Took
Unattractive
Poverty
Manner

More quotes by 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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My work has always been the product of my time.
William Saroyan
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In the time of your life, live-so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches.
William Saroyan
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In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.
William Saroyan
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The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.
William Saroyan
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Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.
William Saroyan
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What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
William Saroyan
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The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.
William Saroyan
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Live, for this is the time of your life.
William Saroyan
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Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
William Saroyan
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I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.
William Saroyan
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We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
William Saroyan
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No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.
William Saroyan
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In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.
William Saroyan
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It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
William Saroyan
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Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
William Saroyan
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You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.
William Saroyan
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How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.
William Saroyan
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Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
William Saroyan
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The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
William Saroyan