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There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.

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
Knowing
Unkind
Dies
Severe
Another
Gentle
Littles
Forgotten
Little
Writers
Human
Pride
Humans
Writer
Men
Shall
Kindly

More quotes by William Saroyan

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I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.
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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'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.
William Saroyan
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Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
William Saroyan
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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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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.
William Saroyan
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One day in the afternoon of the world, glum death will come and sit in you, and when you get up to walk, you will be as glum as death, but if you're lucky, this will only make the fun better and the love greater.
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What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?
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Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.
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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.
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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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The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops
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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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.
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The child race is fresh, eager, interested, innocent, imaginative, healthy and full of faith, where the adult race, more often than not, is stale, spiritually debauched, unimaginative, unhealthy, and without faith.
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What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?
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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Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
William Saroyan
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I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
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