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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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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
Human
Records
Novelist
Humans
Results
Phases
First
Create
Accurate
Time
Opinion
Novelists
History
Currents
Business
Permanent
Snarl
Character
Record
Foremost
Firsts
Characters
Phase

More quotes by John Dos Passos

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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
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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.
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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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.
John Dos Passos
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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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Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
John Dos Passos
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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
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Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.
John Dos Passos
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U.S.A. is the speech of the people
John Dos Passos
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Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
John Dos Passos
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We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
John Dos Passos
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What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
John Dos Passos
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The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.
John Dos Passos
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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.
John Dos Passos
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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.
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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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.
John Dos Passos
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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
John Dos Passos