Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
SINCLAIR LEWISYou’ve been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-‘fess up!
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
-
-
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.
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 -
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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 -
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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 -
If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Good Lord, I don’t know what ‘rights’ a man has! And I don’t know the solution of boredom. If I did, I’d be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want — and what I want now is a drink.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
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 -
A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
As ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
SINCLAIR LEWIS