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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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William Saroyan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 31
Died: 1981
Died: May 18
Dramatist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Fresno
California
People
Rare
Comic
Ridiculous
Tiresome
Seek
Malicious
Events
Coarse
Even
Crude
Good
Crooked
Things
Commonplace

More quotes by William Saroyan

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The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
William Saroyan
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You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.
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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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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.
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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The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.
William Saroyan
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If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is no longer a thief.
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This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
William Saroyan
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I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.
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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The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
William Saroyan
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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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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Sunday is the day people go quietly mad, one way or another.
William Saroyan
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What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?
William Saroyan
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The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.
William Saroyan
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I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.
William Saroyan
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You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.
William Saroyan