John Dos Passos - Find Quotes

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For something like forty years I've been getting various sorts of narratives off my chest without being able to hit upon a classification for them. There's something dreary to me about the publisher's arbitrary division of every word written for publication into fiction and nonfiction. My writing has a most irritating way of being difficult to classify in either category. At times I would find it hard to tell you whether the stuff is prose or verse. Gradually I've come up with the tag: contemporary chronicle.

John Dos Passos

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

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

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