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 LEWISIt is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
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Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
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To 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.
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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
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Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.
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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.
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Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
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So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
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We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
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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 -
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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God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
SINCLAIR LEWIS