To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
SINCLAIR LEWISA village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
-
-
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 -
One quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
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 -
Emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
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 -
My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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!
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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 -
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business … then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
SINCLAIR LEWIS