John Dos Passos Quotes

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

If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

Individuality is freedom lived.

The creation of a world view is the work of a generation rather than of an individual, but we each of us, for better or for worse, add our brick to the edifice.

The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs

Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.

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

I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.

Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.

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 estate?

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you

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 that constitutes growing older.

Marxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.

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. The cure for apathy is comprehension.

A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.

Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.

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.

A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as possible in order to get relief.

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

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

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.

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.

Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.

Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.

War is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.

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 how to make money.

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

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.

When I was a kid I used to tell myself the moon was a silver gong and if I could climb high enough to beat on it with both hands all my wishes would come true.

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 the Renaissance.

U.S.A. is the speech of the people

Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.

In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.

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.

What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.

Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.

Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

People do not choose a career; the career envelopes them.

Curiosity urges you on-driving force.

Eh Bien you like this sacred pig of a country?" asked Marco. "Why not? I like it anywhere. It's all the same, in France you are paid badly and live well; here you are paid well and live badly.

A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right

A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.

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.

The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don't fall out they let them live another year.

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.