John Dos Passos Quotes

87 Sourced Quotes

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

John Dos Passos
She pressed her dry eyes against the white cool linen of the pillow and lay on her face rocking to and from. Then she jumped out of bed and began to walk about her narrow bedroom. She must go out.

John Dos Passos
A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.

John Dos Passos
It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction... Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

John Dos Passos
Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?

John Dos Passos
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
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
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
We're headed for collapse, if you want my opinion, Missy. I can see it in the fallin' off of the quality of vagrants. There was atime you could find real good company in almost any jungle you'd pick, men who could talk, men who'd read a book now and then; and now, what do you find, a lot of dirty little guttersnipes no decent tramp would want to associate with.
Well, it's been that way all through history.

John Dos Passos
It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.

John Dos Passos
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
The chilly December day! two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio first felt their homemade contraption whittled out of hickory sticks, gummed together with Arnstein's bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk.

John Dos Passos
Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.

John Dos Passos
When you write about something you often never think of it again.

John Dos Passos
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
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
I learned French at an early age, and Spanish, and Portuguese. I tried Russian, but I didn't do very well with it. I used to get a special kind of headache over their verbs.

John Dos Passos
Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.

John Dos Passos
I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.

John Dos Passos
Would not some lightning flash of vision sear people's consciousness into life again? What was the good of stopping the war if armies continued?

John Dos Passos
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.

John Dos Passos
People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

John Dos Passos
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
Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by.

John Dos Passos
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
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
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
Make sure he ain't a dinge, boys.
Make sure he ain't a guinea or a kike,
how can you tell a guy's a hunredpercent when all you've got's a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?

John Dos Passos
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
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