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.
SINCLAIR LEWISBeing a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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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 -
Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
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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 -
I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
SINCLAIR LEWIS -
In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
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 -
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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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 -
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
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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.
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When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
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To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.
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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.
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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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With your great experience, don’t you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes.
SINCLAIR LEWIS