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Americans still believe they are cut out to be successful-in everything: love, love-making, luck, luck-giving, money-making, sense-making, cancer-avoiding, clothes-wearing, car-driving, and so on.

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
Everything
Cutting
Avoiding
Giving
Successful
Wearing
Believe
Making
Driving
Love
Sense
Cancer
Money
Luck
Stills
Car
America
Americans
Still
Clothes

More quotes by William Saroyan

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To Armenians, half Armenians, quarter Armenians, and one-eight Armenians. Sixteen and thirty-second Armenians, and other winners, are likelier to be happy with a useful book
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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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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In the most commonplace, tiresome, ridiculous, malicious, coarse, crude, or even crooked people or events I had to seek out rare things, good things, comic things, and I did so.
William Saroyan
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Of course if you like your kids, if you love them from the moment they begin, you yourself begin all over again, in them, with them, and so there is something more to the world again.
William Saroyan
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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
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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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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When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
William Saroyan
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I believe in anything that works.
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?
William Saroyan
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I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.
William Saroyan
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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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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.
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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Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
William Saroyan
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Chance acquaintances are sometimes the most memorable, for brief friendships have such definite starting and stopping points that they take on a quality of art, of a whole thing, which cannot be broken or spoiled.
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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Doctors don't know everything really. They understand matter, not spirit. And you and I live in the spirit.
William Saroyan