John Dos Passos's Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Accidents will happen in the best regulated families.

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

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

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

Sex is a slotmachine.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.