Sinclair Lewis Quotes - Page 4

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.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me - I actually took my teachers seriously!

The cocktail filled him with a whirling exhilaration behind which he was aware of devastating desires—to rush places in fast motors, to kiss girls, to sing, to be witty. ... He perceived that he had gifts of profligacy which had been neglected. —chapter 8

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

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."

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?

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.

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

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.

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.

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.

Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

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.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.