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The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.

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
May
Shape
Ever
Basic
Thing
Shapes
Way
Knowing
Things
Less
Dream
Form
Determining
Truth
Nearly

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Writers are a fascinating breed, because there are so many kinds of them, they are made by so many circumstances, conditions, and mysteries, and there are so many ways for writing to be done.
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When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
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The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.
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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.
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I don't think my writing is sentimental, although it is a very sentimental thing to be a human being.
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My work is writing, but my real work is being.
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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.
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I believe in anything that works.
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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.
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Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.
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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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We get very little wisdom from success, you know.
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Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.
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Nothing good ever ends.
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What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners...I want my children to be people- each one separate- each one special- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others
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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
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The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
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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.
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It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.
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