154 Quotes by John Dos Passos

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.

A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them. Still, you can’t listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.

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.

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.

The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, workingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the rich, the cops were for the rich;.

Shakespeare wouldn’t have been any good if he’d stayed in Stratford. He had to go to London to be bathed in the full current of the Renaissance.

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.

Mealtime’s the only time I get to devote to the things of the spirit.

It’s easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.