John Dos Passos

“People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Careers #People

“If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Special #Would Be #Contemplation

“Individuality is freedom lived.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Individuality #Liberty

“I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Paddling #Should

“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

#Views #Bricks #Add

“Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?”
-- John Dos Passos

#New Year #Easter #Stupid

“Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Life #Hands #Used

“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

#Successful #Romantic Love #Long

“Git an eyeful of cesspool alley the land of opportunity.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Opportunity #Land #Alleys

“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

#Beautiful #Freedom #People

“The fascinating thing to a dispassionate observer about the structure of life in the Soviet Union is that in their efforts to produce an unknown that we may let its ideologists call Socialism the Communist dictators have produced a brutal approximation of monopoly Capitalism, a system that has all the disadvantages of our own, with none of the palliatives which come to us from surviving competition and from the essential division of economic and political power which has so far made it possible for the humane traditions of the Western world to continue.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Political #Effort #Competition

“It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Attitude #Party #Believe

“What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Men #Ideas #Political

“Mealtime's the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Time #Spirit #Eating

“I never understood exactly why people get engaged--The only time I ever did the most disastrous things happened--but I feel that there's a great deal to be said for immediate matrimony always. If I once got started I'd probably have to become a mormon to cover my confusion. What I mean is that if he and she are crazy about each other it is sheer tempting God to stay apart, come what may. And if people arent crazy about each other being engaged wont help them.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Marriage #Crazy #Mean

“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

#Past #Events #High Standards

“The Gospel of the army is cunning, as of all other human activities. The wisdom of the snake under the meekness of the sheep is what wins out. The first Commandment is--never let them get anything on you-- The second: Graft--get privileges others haven't got--worm yourself into confidence The Third--seem neat and prosperous--as if you had money in the bank”
-- John Dos Passos

#Army #Winning #Sheep

“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.”
-- John Dos Passos

#America #Civilization #People

“It is a most curious experience for a man of seventy-two to be confronted with the greenhorn enthusiasms of his youth. Young people think they are so smart. Alas the doctrines they spout with such fervor turn out to be mostly parroted from their elders.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Smart #Men #Thinking

“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

#Struggle #Power #Men

“It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Mean #Europe #People

“Talk is a pure art. Its only limits are the patience of listeners who, when they get tired, can always pay for their coffee or change it with a friendly waiter and walk out.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Art #Coffee #Tired

“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

#Fighting #Thoughtful #Thinking

“The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Men #Pie #Ice Cream

“The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Writing #Mind #Generations

“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

#Memories #Leaving #Mind

“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

#Character #Novelists #Records

“The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Book #Writing #Reality

“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

#Book #Creativity #Adventure

“There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.”
-- John Dos Passos

#Writing #Character #Novelists