John Dos Passos Quotes (21 Quotes)

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.

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.

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.

Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.

U.S.A. is the speech of the people.

Breaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.

What is the use being a big man if you are wrong?

I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot, without tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum . . . . I'd like to annihilate these stupid colleges of ours . . . instillers of stodginess.

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

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.

We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.

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.

Letters are largely written to get things out of your system.

People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

It's almost worth having been in the army for the joy your freedom gives you.

A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.

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.

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.

Display advertising and the movies, though they may dull the wits, certainly stimulate the eyes.

Sex is a slotmachine.