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I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
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
Thought
Always
Canoe
Paddling
Concentrate
More quotes by John Dos Passos
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
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
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.
John Dos Passos
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
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
Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.
John Dos Passos
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
What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
John Dos Passos
This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.
John Dos Passos
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.
John Dos Passos
It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
John Dos Passos
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
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
John Dos Passos
U.S.A. is the speech of the people
John Dos Passos
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
We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
John Dos Passos
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
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
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.
John Dos Passos
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.
John Dos Passos
