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… — John Dos Passos Copy Share Image
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 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
