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The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.

— 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.