John Dos Passos Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Mind, Generations

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

• Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

• Women hock their jewels and their husbands' insurance policies to acquire an unaccustomed shade in hair or crêpe de chine. Why then is it that when anyone commits anything novel in the arts he should be always greeted by this same peevish howl of pain and surprise? One is led to suspect that the interest people show in these much talked of commodities, painting, music, and writing, cannot be very deep or very genuine when they so wince under an unexpected impact.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Pain, Husband

• I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Firsts, Six

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

• In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

  John Dos Passos

  Art, Writing, Men

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

• Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Happens

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

• There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Character, Novelists

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

• 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

  Book, Writing, Reality

  John Dos Passos (1988). “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.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Creative, Different

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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