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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.

— John Dos Passos

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More quotes by John Dos Passos

A writer who writes straight is the architect of history.

Great works of the imagination are not produced quickly nor do they take quick effect on the popular mind.

Walt Whitman's a hell of a lot more revolutionary than any Russian poet I've ever heard of.

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 - bound to.

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Dos Passos (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.