William Saroyan Quotes
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My work is writing, but my real work is being.
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I'm not the kind of guy to knock at a door and then when the door is opened not go in.
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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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Armenag Saroyan was the failed poet, the failed Presbyterian preacher, the failed American, the failed theological student.
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Live, for this is the time of your life.
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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.
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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.
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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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I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends. If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all, anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.
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Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.
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In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it."
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The best that can be said for anybody is probably that you misunderstood him favorably.
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The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
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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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She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all.
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My work has always been the product of my time.
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But who can speak to God, or rather who can't? The question is, who can get an answer?
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Remember that every man is a variation of yourself
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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.
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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.
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I see life as one life at one time, so many millions simultaneously, all over the earth.
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San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure.
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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.
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Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.
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All writers are discontent. That's because they're aware of a potential and believe they're not reaching it.
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Baseball is caring. Player and fan alike must care, or there is no game. If there's no game, there's no pennant race and no World Series. And for all any of us know there might soon be no nation at all. It is good to care - in any dimension. More Americans put their caring into baseball than into anything else I can think of - and most put at least a little of it there. Baseball can be trusted, as great art can, and bad art can't.
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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.
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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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The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?
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