John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passoswas an American novelist and artist active in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he graduated from Harvard College in 1916. He was well-traveled, visiting Europe and the Middle East, where he learned about literature, art, and architecture. During World War I he was a member of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in Paris and in Italy, later joining the U.S. Army Medical Corps...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth14 January 1896
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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?
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.
I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.
Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.
Life is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.
I've always thought you should concentrate on paddling your own canoe.
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.
Individuality is freedom lived.
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?
If there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.
Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.
A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.