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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.

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
Often
Innocent
Unimaginative
Without
Adults
Stale
Children
Interested
Eager
Healthy
Unhealthy
Full
Spiritually
Child
Imaginative
Race
Adult
Faith
Fresh
Debauched

More quotes by 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.
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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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My work has always been the product of my time.
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
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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.
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You write a hit play the same way you write a flop.
William Saroyan
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There is a small area of land in Asia Minor that is called Armenia, but it is not so. It is not Armenia. It is a place. There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth.
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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.
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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan
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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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The writer who is a real writer is a rebel who never stops.
William Saroyan
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I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
William Saroyan
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Jack Benny had style from the beginning. He stood straight and walked kind of sideways as if he were being gently shoved by a touch of genius.
William Saroyan
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Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
William Saroyan
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What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?
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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Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
William Saroyan
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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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I have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?
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Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
William Saroyan