Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
SINCLAIR LEWISFunny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays ’em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera–or war or fiction.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn’t a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.
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In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.
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Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?
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We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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I must say I’m not very fond of oratory that’s so full of energy it hasn’t any room for facts.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
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Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.
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The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure–wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.
SINCLAIR LEWIS






