When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
SINCLAIR LEWISI think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
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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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His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
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Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
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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.
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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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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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In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn’t the initial cost, it’s the humidity.
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Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
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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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In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.
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The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.”
SINCLAIR LEWIS