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

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What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
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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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You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.
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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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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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The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.
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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
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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 always know a lie when I hear it, and the effect it has on me is no good at all. I go berserk just forcing myself not to go berserk, just trying to see truth in the lie, to see it in full context, and in a dimension in which it has got to be more than just a lie, possibly the profoundest kind of truth.
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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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My work has always been the product of my time.
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Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
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In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
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I believe that time, with its infinite understanding, will one day forgive me.
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Kids are always the only future the human race has.
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We didn't say anything because there was such an awful lot to say, and no language to say it in.
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It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.
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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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All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
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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.
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