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I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal, unattractive, and unecessary idea ever imposed upon the human race.

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
Humans
Became
Important
Writer
Writing
Race
Years
Upon
Unattractive
Life
Idea
Unreal
Ideas
Imposed
Ever
Several
Human
Seemed

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Even after you've won fame and fortune, every time you write you've got to write, there's no shortcut, you have to start your career all over again.
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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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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 have an idea that most of all he is running away from love, because it's too big and too demanding. He's running away from us--from you, from me, from his sister, from himself, too. Who wants to be himself, who wants to be so little, and so captured and limited?
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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.
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The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
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The events of life have never fallen into the form of the short story or the form of the poem, or into any other form.Yourown consciousnessisthe only formyouneed.
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Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart.
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Christmas is sights, especially the sights of Christmas reflected in the eyes of a child.
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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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The whole world and every human being in it is everybody's business.
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I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.
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I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.
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I'm no Armenian. I'm an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this: an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn't do it.
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Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
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Sometimes the most intelligent thing is not to do anything, certainly nothing loaded with the imbecility of emotionality.
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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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Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
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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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I sometimes think that rich men belong to another nationality entirely, no matter what their actual nationality happens to be. The nationality of the rich.
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