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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
Events
Coarse
Even
Crude
Good
Crooked
Things
Commonplace
People
Rare
Comic
Ridiculous
Tiresome
Seek
Malicious

More quotes by William Saroyan

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Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.
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Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
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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.
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The order I found was the order of disorder
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Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.
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I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.
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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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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 believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
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Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.
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I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.
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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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Kids are always the only future the human race has.
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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.
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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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All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
William Saroyan
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Art is what is irresistible.
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Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.
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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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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.
William Saroyan