John Dos Passos: Being

John Dos Passos was novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter. Explore interesting quotes on being.
John Dos Passos: 50 quotes0 likes

“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.”

John Dos Passos

"Grosz Comes to America," Esquire, 1936

“For something like forty years I've been getting various sorts of narratives off my chest without being able to hit upon a classification for them. There's something dreary to me about the publisher's arbitrary division of every word written for publication into fiction and nonfiction. My writing has a most irritating way of being difficult to classify in either category. At times I would find it hard to tell you whether the stuff is prose or verse. Gradually I've come up with the tag: contemporary chronicle.”

John Dos Passos

Presentation at Carleton College, Nov 30 1960

“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.”

John Dos Passos

"Statement of Belief," Bookman, Sept 1928

“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.”

John Dos Passos

"Conversation with Dos Passos," New Leader, Feb 23 1959