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

More quotes by William Saroyan

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Kids are always the only future the human race has.
William Saroyan
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How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.
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I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.
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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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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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Love doesn't have to be perfect. Even perfect, it is still the best thing there is, for the simple reason that it is the most common and constant truth of all, of all life, all law and order, the very thing which holds everything together, which permits everything to move along in time and be its wonderful or ordinary self.
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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What is a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence to their peace.
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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Lionel whispered because he was under the impression that it was out of respect for books, not consideration for readers.
William Saroyan
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In the end, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.
William Saroyan
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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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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 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.
William Saroyan
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I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way they had been. Just a little things, of course. A little of my little.
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All of the sudden, he said, I feel different-- not like I ever felt before. Even when Papa died I didn't feel this way. In two days everything is changed. I'm lonely and I don't now what I'm lonely for
William Saroyan
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Yes, the idiot is indeed the good man, but only because he doesn't know any better.
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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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.
William Saroyan
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What can a man do to move along in some kind of grace through his days and years?
William Saroyan