John Dos Passos Quotes

Once you take away the struggle for food, clothing and shelter, work is the one four letter word that offends everyone.

We did everything we could to save my legs, and it just came to a point where if we didn't amputate my legs, I wouldn't survive. In that situation, you kind of go into survival mode, and you find strength.

I know all my tricks, and I'm pretty bored with them, so if that's all someone wants, I'd rather wait for TV money and not work so hard.

We were poor and lived modestly, but we always had food on the table.

I want to keep working. I have been stuck in this routine of coming to the set, putting on my make-up, eating, and leaving for home.

I worked all the time and when I say that, I mean I would work for three weeks, come home for a month, and work again, but it would have been nice to take long chunks of time off.

I'm either working or I'm lying in bed the entire day.

In SW1 you don't really need survival skills, you just exist.

I would take vouchers, do sums in my head just to get some eggs and bread or a tin of cheap Irish stew. I'd be starving and want two tins but couldn't afford it. The poorer you are the hungrier you feel.

I would never have got involved in something that just meant turning up at eight and leaving at five.

I'm not greedy - I have a pretty good life. I don't have an expensive lifestyle, so I can make my living teaching classes at my gym.

Working from nine till five every day at something that gives you no pleasure just so that, after thirty years, you can retire.

As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.

A woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing doesn't want to go to the movies to watch a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing.

She worked in order to live, and presently fell in love, also in order to live, for the heart, too, has its hunger.

Morality and religion are but words to him who fishes in gutters for the means of sustaining life, and crouches behind barrels in the street for shelter from the cutting blasts of a winter night.

Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.

Men have two basic needs. Neither of them, no matter what they say, is sex. They need love and they need work. And work takes priority over love. If a woman could know only one fact about men and work, it should be that work is the most seductive mistress most men ever have.

If all the year were playing holidays; To sport would be as tedious as to work.

Since I didn't grow up going to school dances, etc., I didn't have the normal . . . I grew up in a very different way so a lot of the childish concerns or teenage concerns weren't my concerns. My concerns were survival.

I'm sure nobody wants to just work and earn money and all that stuff. I know it's difficult for people to break out of the syndrome, doing a normal job.

It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

All I do is work, that's all my life is work.

We bore ourselves in order to earn money that we'll later spend on trying to de-bore ourselves