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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.

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
Saying
Didn
Used
Great
Things
Occur
Throw

More quotes by William Saroyan

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You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.
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Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.
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I never knew teachers are human beings like everybody else-- and better too!
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But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
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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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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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No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend,and there are many more of these than one would suspect.
William Saroyan
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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.
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.
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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Live, for this is the time of your life.
William Saroyan
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I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.
William Saroyan
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Nothing good ever ends.
William Saroyan
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This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
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.
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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I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.
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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You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
William Saroyan
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Two years ago your father died, Ulysses. But as long as we are alive, as long as we are together, as long as two of us are left, and remember him, nothing in the world can take him from us.
William Saroyan