Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
SINCLAIR LEWISUpon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one’s business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
-
-
Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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?
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
And that the pastor’s sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which ‘did a fellow good– kept him in touch with Higher Things.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is….”
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
With your great experience, don’t you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Funny 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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
SINCLAIR LEWIS