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.
Interpretation
Writing serves as an escape from life's negativity and struggles.
In this quote, William Saroyan expresses how writing became a refuge for him from various hardships and feelings of despair. He suggests that the act of writing allows individuals to transcend their personal battles with meaninglessness and insignificance, transforming pain into art and expression.
In practice
During a literary workshop, to inspire young writers, you could quote Saroyan to emphasize how writing can provide solace during difficult times.
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
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.
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing.
I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?
Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.
It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.
I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun. 'I forget myself, I am a little poor consumer.' I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it say, 'This is me! This is me!'
I like ruins because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.
Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going stark staring mad. You've got to be in control.
Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.
I began to exercise a lot of cinematic muscle with the precepts I had learned in the New York art world. Film was intriguing. I began to think of art as elitist; film was not.
I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know.
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