John Dos Passos Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

What is the use being a big man if you are wrong?

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

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.

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

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Experiments in the visual arts (the invention of new ways of seeing things), are made because, due to the way the apparatus that makes up the mind is made, old processes and patterns have continually to be broken up in order to make it possible to perceive the new aspects and arrangements of evolving consciousness. The great enemy of intelligence is complacency.

Women alone always order sole. It means something.

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.

Sex is a slotmachine.

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 bicycle cement, stretched with muslin they'd sewn on their sister's sewing machine in their own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio, soar into the air above the dunes and the wide beach at Kitty Hawk.

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

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 are in the position of a man with an elaborate camping kit who finds himself lost in the woods without his matches; to kindle a fire he has to resort to the stratagems of the caveman. We fall back through generations into the oldest terrors and confusions of the race.

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 of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.

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

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 only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

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 human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

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 of mental processes and revolts, crimes, despairs pass off in a dribble of vague words and rubber stamp phrases without leaving a scratch on the mind of the driven instalment-paying, subway-packing mass.

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

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.

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

I dont think there is anything on earth more wonderful than those wistful incomplete friendships one makes now and then in an hour's talk. You never see the people again, but the lingering sense of their presence in the world is like the glow of an unseen city at night--makes you feel the teemingness of it all.

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.

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts...

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

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.

Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?

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

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

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.

There's something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.

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

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

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 this country and then we allow a lot of foreigners, the scum of Europe, the offscourings of Polish ghettos to come and run it for us.

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.

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 experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.

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

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth-century fiction. . . Without [Theodore] Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish.

I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum . . . .I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours . . . instillers of stodginess.

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.

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.

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.

That's the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.

I never understood exactly why people get engaged--The only time I ever did the most disastrous things happened--but I feel that there's a great deal to be said for immediate matrimony always. If I once got started I'd probably have to become a mormon to cover my confusion. What I mean is that if he and she are crazy about each other it is sheer tempting God to stay apart, come what may. And if people arent crazy about each other being engaged wont help them.

Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.

The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.

It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.

Curiosity urges you on-driving force.

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

Isn't it curious how completely ignorant we all are of the most important part of our bodily mechanism. It is really criminal. Yet there is no nation in the world that doesnt surround sex with fantastic walls. Of course ours are sillier than any-but not much.

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.

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

The Gospel of the army is cunning, as of all other human activities. The wisdom of the snake under the meekness of the sheep is what wins out. The first Commandment is--never let them get anything on you-- The second: Graft--get privileges others haven't got--worm yourself into confidence The Third--seem neat and prosperous--as if you had money in the bank

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

It has been the struggle between privileged men who have managed to get hold of the levers of power and the people in general withtheir vague and changing aspirations for equality, for justice, for some kind of gentler brotherhood and peace, which has kept that balance of forces we call our system of government in equilibrium.

The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.

A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given momentin the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?

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 and original way of putting it down on paper.

[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 nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.

To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind offreedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house.

Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.

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

The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

Time has an undertaking establishment on every block and drives his coffin nails faster than the steam riveters rivet or the stenographers type or the tickers tick out fours and eights and dollar signs and ciphers.

Remember that it's never a crime in the face of humanity and enlightenment to distribute the works of the great humanists among the merchants and moneychangers of this godforsaken country... You better slip me the dough.

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

It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

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 he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.

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.

The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.

Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?

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.

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

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.

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

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

The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.

Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.

Individuality is freedom lived.

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?

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