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 LEWISEvery compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
-
-
Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
We’re tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We’re tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much – and like so well?
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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 -
Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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 -
The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.
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!
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
SINCLAIR LEWIS