Why won't they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, can't they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping - rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year's and Easter and Christmas - But, goodness, why need they do it?
John Dos PassosThe Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.
John Dos PassosIt's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.
John Dos PassosWomen is fine once you got em pinned down, boss, but when they ain't pinned down they're hell.
John Dos PassosMarxism has not only failed to promote human freedom, it has failed to produce food.
John Dos PassosIf there is a special Hades for writers is would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
John Dos PassosThe people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.
John Dos Passos