Quote

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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William Saroyan
Age: 72 †
Born: 1908
Born: August 31
Died: 1981
Died: May 18
Dramatist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Fresno
California
Best
Certainly
Intervals
Everything
Tough
Everlasting
Thing
Dying
Aside
Courses
Final
Course
Finals
Sleep
Keeping
Another
Putting
Tentative
Truth
Except
Interval

More quotes by William Saroyan

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I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involving multitudes.
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It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.
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The Tax Collector's letters are invariably mimeographed, and all they say is that you still haven't paid him.
William Saroyan
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Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I'm from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
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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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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If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life.
William Saroyan
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There's a pretty woman for ever lucky man in the world: every man in the world is a lucky man if he only knew it, so why waste time?
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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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan
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But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
William Saroyan
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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.
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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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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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.
William Saroyan
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My work has always been the product of my time.
William Saroyan
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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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San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.
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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Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.
William Saroyan