In certain savage tribes in New Guinea, they put the old people up in the trees and shake them once a year in the spring; if they don't fall out they let them live another year.
John Dos PassosBreaking with old friends is one of the most painful of the changes in all that piling up of a multitude of small distasteful changes that constitutes growing older.
John Dos PassosI 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 PassosThree 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