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.
The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.
What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ?_x000D_ George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.
When I'm writing, I like to seal everything off and face the wall, not to look outside the window. The only way out is through the sentences.
For artists and intellectuals today, what is most needed is to be clear about social responsibility, because that is what most people automatically give up. Just to protect yourself as an individual is very political. You don't have to march on Tiananmen, but you do have to be clear-minded, to find your own means of expression.
I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale
While I drew, and wept along with the terrified children I was drawing, I really felt the burden I am bearing. I felt that I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate.
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