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Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

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
Soon
Dead
Alive
Enough
Trying

More quotes by William Saroyan

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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.
William Saroyan
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All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
William Saroyan
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Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.
William Saroyan
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San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.
William Saroyan
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Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.
William Saroyan
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Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.
William Saroyan
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All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can be made tolerable only by mockery in one form or another.
William Saroyan
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People are people. Don't be afraid of them.
William Saroyan
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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
William Saroyan
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Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.
William Saroyan
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Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
William Saroyan
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To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book
William Saroyan
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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.
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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I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?
William Saroyan
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Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world.
William Saroyan
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What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
William Saroyan
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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
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I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.
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