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Quote by John Dos Passos

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

Author

John Dos Passos was an American novelist born on January 14, 1896, and died on September 28, 1970. His works are known for their unique narrative style and profound insights into the realities of American society. more

“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.”

People Giving Writing Book Reality Age Able Class Gains Entertainment Excuse Novelists Historian Imaginary Factual Biographers Vicarious

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“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.”

Firsts Humans Character Results Opinion Records Currents Permanent Novelists Accurate Phases

Author:John Dos Passos

“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.”

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.”

Hell Heard Poet Revolutionary Walt

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.”

People Years Lasts Five Becoming Habit Twenties Visuals Five Years Twenty Five

Book:Travel books and other writings, 1916-1941

Source: Travel books and other writings, 1916-1941

“Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.”

Mind Imagination Effects Great Work

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.”

Should Writing Different Problem Faces Young Courses Creative Generations Taught Solve Creative Writing Seminars Previous Generations

Book:John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

Source: John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose

“I think the satirist is always basically optimistic. The satirist's complaint about society is always that it doesn't measure up to a fairly high ideal he has. I think that even the bitterest satirist, even a man like Swift, was probably rather an optimist at heart.”

Thinking Men Heart Ideals Optimistic Complaints Optimist Satirist

Author:John Dos Passos

“Hemingway always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff. He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it's getting to be true.”

Years May Has Beens Used Stuff Mistake Including Being True Fifty Great Mistakes

Author:John Dos Passos

“Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.”

Artist Values Products Strive Aesthetic

Book:The letters of Evelyn Waugh

Source: The letters of Evelyn Waugh

Quote by John Dos Passos

Author

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