Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
SINCLAIR LEWISFunny 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.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.
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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.
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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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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.
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If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows.
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The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
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Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?
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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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Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country.
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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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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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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.
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A 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.
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Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics!
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You,” Said Dr. Yavitch, “are a middle-road liberal, and you haven’t the slightest idea what you want.
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It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
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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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In everything was the spirit of children’s play – not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.
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Illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature’s hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God’s marvelous firmament!
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God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
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There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don’t wish to do.
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.
SINCLAIR LEWIS