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Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.

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
Making
Sooner
Truth
Myth
Better
Popular
Everything
Defined
Always
Worse
Later
Perspective
Identified
Everybody
Simultaneously

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In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.
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We get very little wisdom from success, you know.
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There could be no extreme vanity in my recognition of myself, if in fact there could be any at all.
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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
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Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
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My work is writing, but my real work is being.
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It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
William Saroyan
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Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
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She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.
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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.
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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.
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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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What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
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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.
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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.
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The simple fact was that if the song wasn't about me, I couldn't see how it could possibly be about anybody else, including the one I knew it was supposed to be about, and good luck to him, too.
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The basic truth of all things, as nearly as we may ever dream of determining and knowing this truth, is form, that which is, as it is. The way and shape of the thing no less than the thing itself.
William Saroyan
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The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
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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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You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.
William Saroyan