Quote

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.

John Dos Passos

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

John Dos Passos
Age: 74 †
Born: 1896
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: September 28
Journalist
Novelist
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
War Correspondent
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
John Roderigo Dos Passos
J. R. Dos Passos
First
Chapters
Right
Occasionally
Writing
Six
Time
Seven
Times
Often
Certain
Firsts
Revising

More quotes by John Dos Passos

Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
U.S.A. is the speech of the people
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
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 estate?
John Dos Passos
Image
People don't choose their careers they are engulfed by them.
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
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.
John Dos Passos
Image
A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right
John Dos Passos
Image
Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.
John Dos Passos
Image
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
John Dos Passos
Image
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?
John Dos Passos
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 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.
John Dos Passos
Image
A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.
John Dos Passos
Image
A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.
John Dos Passos
Image
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
John Dos Passos