All John Dos Passos Quotes
- 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.… Any
- Letters are largely written to get things out of your system. Funny
- Women alone always order sole. It means something. Alone
- Shakespeare wouldn't have been any good if he'd stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of… Any
- Sex is a slotmachine. Funny
- 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… Air
- A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey. Inspirational
- Men who have lost their conviction of what is good and what is bad find themselves without a sextant to check their position by. We… Bad
- 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… Afoot
- Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats. Bonbons
- A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. Form
- 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. Another Novel
- I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe. Always Thought
- The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort… Able
- 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… Accurate
- One of the most extraordinary things about industrial society of the present day is its idiot lack of memory. Tabloids and movies take the place… Crime
- Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of. Any
- In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are… Americans
- Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind. Effect
- 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… Constantly
- 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… Always Basically
- [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… Always Claimed
- 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… All
- 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… Anywhere
- Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes. Advertising