The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre,… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
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… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
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… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
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… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas. — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
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… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
