Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
SINCLAIR LEWISI’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.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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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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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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
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Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods.
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The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
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The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
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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.
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My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .
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Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it’s still just work.
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She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.
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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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One quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
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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 LEWIS -
So that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne’er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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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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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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The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.
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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
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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.
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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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It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it,
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People read fiction for emotion-not information
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To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
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Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
SINCLAIR LEWIS