Sinclair Lewis Quotes - Page 2

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

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.

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.

I love America, but I don't like it.

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.

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.

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

What is Love? Listen! It is the rainbow that stands out, in all its glorious many-colored hues, illuminating and making glad again the dark clouds of life. It is the morning and the evening star, that in glad refulgence, there on the awed horizon, call Nature's hearts to an uplifted rejoicing in God's marvelous firmament!

We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

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.

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.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera--or war or fiction.

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.