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John Dos Passos Quotes about Writing

All John Dos Passos Quotes Art Country Imagination Lying Time Writing quotes
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.

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 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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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”

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