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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
Early
Enslavement
Took
Unattractive
Poverty
Manner
Health
Ill
Age
Escape
Natural
Inevitable
Unimportance
Writing
Madness
Uselessness
Things
Despair
Insignificance

More quotes by William Saroyan

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What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
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What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?
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It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
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Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.
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But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
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My work is writing, but my real work is being.
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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.
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No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.
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All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
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Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
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I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.
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I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
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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 soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
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There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
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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.
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I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else-- and better too!
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Cowards are nice, they're interesting, they're gentle, they wouldn't think of shooting down people in a parade from a tower. They want to live, so they can see their kids. They're very brave.
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All things lie dark in possibility.
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San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.
William Saroyan