Top 99 Dos Passos Quotes
#1. John Dos Passos, Raymond Carver, Flaubert and William Maxwell were all very influential when I first started writing. Now, the writers I'm most interested in are the writers who are most unlike me: for example, Denis Johnson.
Jonathan Dee
#2. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armour of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. -John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
#3. With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation's sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.
Bob Shacochis
#4. There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos.
E.L. Doctorow
#5. The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.
George Packer
#6. By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
Tom Wolfe
#7. In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos
George F. Will
#8. I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.
Neil Peart
#9. The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.
Alfred Kazin
#10. People do not choose a career; the career envelopes them.
John Dos Passos
#11. Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.
John Dos Passos
#12. Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.
John Dos Passos
#13. A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.
John Dos Passos
#14. One phrase stuck in Fainy's mind, and he repeated it to himself after he had gone to bed that night: It is time for all honest men to band together to resist the ravages of greedy privilege.
John Dos Passos
#15. A nation in which the centralized power and the separate communities work only to nullify each other.
John Dos Passos
#16. Print so easily spins a web of the commonplace over the fine outlines of life.
John Dos Passos
#17. A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.
John Dos Passos
#18. Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.
John Dos Passos
#19. there can be no reason to believe these officers of an established news organization serving newspapers all over the country failed to realize their responsibilities at a moment of supreme significance to the people of this country.
John Dos Passos
#20. It's rather grisly, isnt it, how soon a living man becomes nothing more than a collection of stocks and bonds and debts and real estate?
John Dos Passos
#21. Admire the United
States not for what we were but for what we might become. Self-governing
democracy was not an established creed, but a program for growth.
John Dos Passos
#22. War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.
John Dos Passos
#23. But the workingpeople, the common people, they won't allow it.' 'It's the common people who get most fun out of the torture and execution of great men ... If it's not going too far back I'd like to know who it was demanded the execution of our friend Jesus H. Christ.
John Dos Passos
#24. How do I get to Broadway?...I want to get to the center of things.
John Dos Passos
#25. But you just watch, little girl. I'm goin' to show 'em. In five years they'll come crawlin' to me on their bellies. I don't know what it is, but I got a kind of feel for the big money.
John Dos Passos
#26. In this country where an hour's train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert, unity of population is hardly to be expected.
John Dos Passos
#27. In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans ... From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.
John Dos Passos
#28. If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the State.
John Dos Passos
#29. Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.
John Dos Passos
#30. I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum ... I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours ... instillers of stodginess.
John Dos Passos
#31. The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.
John Dos Passos
#32. Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
John Dos Passos
#33. It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you.
John Dos Passos
#34. If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.
John Dos Passos
#35. Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.
John Dos Passos
#36. But you're out of another world old kid ... You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.
John Dos Passos
#37. Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.
John Dos Passos
#38. The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.
John Dos Passos
#39. The old Romans knew better; to keep people quiet they filled their bellies.
John Dos Passos
#40. If I were sufficiently romantic I suppose I'd have killed myself long ago just to make people talk about me. I haven't even got the conviction to make a successful drunkard.
John Dos Passos
#41. The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves.
John Dos Passos
#42. People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.
John Dos Passos
#43. Between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground.
John Dos Passos
#44. When I was a kid I used to tell myself the moon was a silver gong and if I could climb high enough to beat on it with both hands all my wishes would come true.
John Dos Passos
#45. It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
John Dos Passos
#47. With people like that we needn't despair of civilisation,
John Dos Passos
#48. Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere. Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear. You have to work days and sit up nights thinking how to make money.
John Dos Passos
#49. There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.
John Dos Passos
#51. Spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating resultlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal.
John Dos Passos
#53. The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;
John Dos Passos
#54. A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts ...
John Dos Passos
#55. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.
John Dos Passos
#57. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked thought.
John Dos Passos
#58. Everything published goes down the same chute out of the overbright glare of publicity into oblivion.
John Dos Passos
#59. With people who are young and aren't scared you can do lots.
John Dos Passos
#60. Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul ... And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?
John Dos Passos
#61. There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.
John Dos Passos
#62. I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.
John Dos Passos
#63. The people of this country are too tolerant. There's no other country in the world where they'd allow it ... After all we built up this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the scum of Europe, the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us.
John Dos Passos
#64. Too goddam many lawyers mixed up in this. Run the sonsobitches out. If they resists shoot 'em, that's what I says to the Governor, but they're all these sonsobitches a lawyers fussin' everythin' up all the time with warrants and habeas corpus and longwinded rigmarole. My ass to habeas corpus.
John Dos Passos
#65. So many Americans felt that their neighbor had no right to know more than they did.
John Dos Passos
#66. The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.
John Dos Passos
#67. If there are no permanent standards, there is no criticism possible.
John Dos Passos
#68. Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
John Dos Passos
#70. It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.
John Dos Passos
#71. We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
John Dos Passos
#72. Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that must have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this new particular vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of the press and the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?
John Dos Passos
#73. Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
John Dos Passos
#74. I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.
John Dos Passos
#75. [Hemingway] always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.
John Dos Passos
#76. A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.
John Dos Passos
#77. Chrisfield looked straight ahead of him. He did not feel lonely any more now that he was marching in ranks again. His feet beat the ground in time with the other feet. He would not have to think whether to go to the right or to the left. He would do as the others did.
John Dos Passos
#79. To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.
John Dos Passos
#80. But how glum he looks now." She threw some daisies at him. Then, after a pause, she added mockingly: "It's hunger, my dear. Good Lord, how dependent men are on food!
John Dos Passos
#82. Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.
John Dos Passos
#83. Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.
John Dos Passos
#84. Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.
John Dos Passos
#85. Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.
John Dos Passos
#86. I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.
John Dos Passos
#87. That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.
John Dos Passos
#88. Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
John Dos Passos
#89. Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.
John Dos Passos
#90. But what's the good of freedom? What can you do with it? What one wants is to live well and have a beautiful house and be respected by people.
John Dos Passos
#91. A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
John Dos Passos
#92. If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos Passos
#94. The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.
John Dos Passos
#95. When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.
John Dos Passos
#97. What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
John Dos Passos
#99. I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
John Dos Passos
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