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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
Cold
Dead
Education
Literature
Clear
American
Like
Professors
Pure

More quotes by Sinclair Lewis

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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
Sinclair Lewis
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
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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
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
Sinclair Lewis
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We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
Sinclair Lewis
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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!
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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You, Said Dr. Yavitch, are a middle-road liberal, and you haven't the slightest idea what you want. I, being a revolutionist, know exactly what I want -- and what I want now is a drink.
Sinclair Lewis
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
Sinclair Lewis
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Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
Sinclair Lewis
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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
Sinclair Lewis
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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
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis
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You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
Sinclair Lewis
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Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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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. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.
Sinclair Lewis
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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest it is an industry.
Sinclair Lewis