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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.

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
Race
Babies
Language
Hatred
Desire
Civilization
Fear
Baby
Speak
Strength
Earth
Rest
Men
Taught
Call
Pretence

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I have always been a Laugher, disturbing people who are not laughers, upsetting whole audiences at theatres... I laugh, that's all. I love to laugh. Laugher to me is being alive. I have had rotten times, and I have laughed through them. Even in the midst of the very worst times I have laughed.
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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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What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
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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.
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My work is writing, but my real work is being.
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All things lie dark in possibility.
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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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Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
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It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
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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.
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What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?
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People are people. Don't be afraid of them.
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Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.
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All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
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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.
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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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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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Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
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The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
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I believe in anything that works.
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