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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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William Saroyan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 31
Died: 1981
Died: May 18
Dramatist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Fresno
California
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Novel
Name
Names
White
Typewriter
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More quotes by William Saroyan

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There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
William Saroyan
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Art is what is irresistible.
William Saroyan
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Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
William Saroyan
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Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
William Saroyan
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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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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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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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I always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.
William Saroyan
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We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.
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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When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
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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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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I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.
William Saroyan
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People is all everything is, all it has ever been, all it can ever be.
William Saroyan
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I believe in anything that works.
William Saroyan
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Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
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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I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.
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