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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.

John Dos Passos

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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
Aspect
Savage
Whose
Savages
Possible
Fierce
Society
Aspects
Nakedly
Order
Relief
Incongruous
Men
Express
Satirist
Flesh
Brutally
Ugly
Creeps

More quotes by John Dos Passos

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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.
John Dos Passos
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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
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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
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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
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U.S.A. is the speech of the people
John Dos Passos
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Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
John Dos Passos
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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
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A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.
John Dos Passos
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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.
John Dos Passos
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People don't choose their careers they are engulfed by them.
John Dos Passos
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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
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The terrible thing about having New York go stale on you is that there's nowhere else. It's the top of the world.
John Dos Passos
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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
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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