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.
SINCLAIR LEWISWhen audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.
More Sinclair Lewis Quotes
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The most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it.
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Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by.
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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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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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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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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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I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We’re tired of drudging and sleeping and dying.
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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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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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Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country.
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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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That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
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There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
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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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS