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If you give to a thief he cannot steal from you, and he is no longer a thief.

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
Steal
Stealing
Longer
Cannot
Give
Giving
Thief
Thieves

More quotes by William Saroyan

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It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn, to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise, to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.
William Saroyan
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Everything and everybody is sooner or later identified, defined, and put in perspective. The truth as always is simultaneously better and worse than what the popular myth-making has it.
William Saroyan
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A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.
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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My work has always been the product of my time.
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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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.
William Saroyan
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The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy-the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops
William Saroyan
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Human memory works its own wheel, and stops where it will, entirely without reference to the last stop, and with no connection with the next.
William Saroyan
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I used to throw things out, saying, 'This isn't great.' It didn't occur to me that it didn't have to be great.
William Saroyan
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All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.
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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Nobody, but nobody, is going to tell me I'm not the most. I am. I was the most when everybody else was struggling bitterly to become a little.
William Saroyan
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I can't hate for long. It isn't worth it.
William Saroyan
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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.
William Saroyan
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Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure.
William Saroyan
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You must not be unkind, especially when it happens that you're right.
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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Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.
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