Quote

What my children appear to be on the surface is no matter to me. I am fooled neither by gracious manners nor by bad manners. I am interested in what is truly beneath each kind of manners...I want my children to be people- each one separate- each one special- each one a pleasant and exciting variation of all the others

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
Special
Separate
Others
Pleasant
Matter
Appear
Children
Surface
Fooled
Kind
Neither
Variation
People
Exciting
Gracious
Interested
Beneath
Truly
Manners

More quotes by 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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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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The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?
William Saroyan
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The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
William Saroyan
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What a people talk about means something. What they don't talk about means something.
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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I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.
William Saroyan
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Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.
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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Kids are always the only future the human race has.
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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The best thing we have is sleep, of course, and what is sleep except the putting aside of everything tentative for another interval of final and everlasting truth? Sleep isn't dying, but it is certainly keeping in tough with it.
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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The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
William Saroyan
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When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
William Saroyan
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Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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The order I found was the order of disorder
William Saroyan
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No city invites the heart to come to life as San Francisco does. Arrival in San Francisco is an experience in living.
William Saroyan
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I have managed to conceal my madness fairly effectively, and as far as I know it hasn't hurt anybody badly, for which I am grateful.
William Saroyan