logo

Quotes from John Dos Passos

Sex is a slotmachine.
~ John Dos Passos
Women is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.
~ John Dos Passos
People don't choose their careers; they are engulfed by them.
~ John Dos Passos
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
What's the use, there never was a woman living who could understand political ideas.
~ John Dos Passos
When the typewriter stops in a New York office everybody's embarrassed; men start to quarrel or to make love to the stenographer or drop lighted cigarettes in the wastebasket.
~ John Dos Passos
But you're out of another world old kid … You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.
~ John Dos Passos
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
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
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
Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.
~ 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
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
America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and when they want to they hire the executioner to throw the switch.
~ John Dos Passos
Make sure he ain't a dinge, boys.Make sure he ain't a guinea or a kike,how can you tell a guy's a hunredpercent when all you've got's a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?
~ John Dos Passos
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.
~ 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
We work to eat to get the strength to work to eat to get the strength to work.
~ John Dos Passos
If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.
~ John Dos Passos
I never see the dawn that I don't say to myself perhaps.
~ 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
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
The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armour of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error." -John Dos Passos
~ John Dos Passos
self respect. self reliance. self control.
~ John Dos Passos