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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
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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
Come
Twenties
Years
Americans
People
Habit
Becoming
Five
Visuals
Lasts
Visual
Last
Habits
Change
Twenty
More quotes by 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
What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
John Dos Passos
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
People don't choose their careers they are engulfed by them.
John Dos Passos
This ain't a war... It's a goddam whorehouse.
John Dos Passos
The world's becoming a museum of socialist failures.
John Dos Passos
A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right
John Dos Passos
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
Democracy evolves where freedom is able to determine its own policy.
John Dos Passos
