The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainmen… - John Dos Passos

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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

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About John Dos Passos

John Roderigo Dos Passos (January 14 1896 – September 28, 1970) was an American novelist and artist.

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Birth Name: John Roderigo Dos Passos

Alternative Names: J. R. Dos Passos

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Martin Amis John Banville Wilfrid Sheed Randall Jarrell Norman Mailer

Additional quotes by John Dos Passos

In the last twenty-five years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans . . . From being a wordminded people we are becoming an eyeminded people.

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.

There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young writers 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.

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-cla… - John Dos Passos

About John Dos Passos

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