Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
SINCLAIR LEWISTo a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.
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It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, ’tain’t any laughing matter!
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I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn’t a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me – I actually took my teachers seriously!
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There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.
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The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, “The trouble with this country is….”
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Don’t be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.
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It is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs.
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God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
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The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”
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It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.
SINCLAIR LEWIS