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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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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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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I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
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Be grateful for yourself...be thankful.
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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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It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
William Saroyan
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What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
William Saroyan
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I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
William Saroyan
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The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
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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The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
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Human greatness is a rather difficult thing to account for, and more often than not one is mistaken in one's hunches about somebody one has met.
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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I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.
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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People are people. Don't be afraid of them.
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
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Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?
William Saroyan