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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
American
Like
Professors
Pure
Cold
Dead
Education
Literature
Clear

More quotes by Sinclair Lewis

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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
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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.
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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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
Sinclair Lewis
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Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
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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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
Sinclair Lewis
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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
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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Life is hard and astonishingly complicated.... No one great reform will make it easy. Most of us who work -- or want to work -- will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.
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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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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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
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Indians, of course, have no theology, and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.
Sinclair Lewis
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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
Sinclair Lewis
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Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I've heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.
Sinclair Lewis
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There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it.
Sinclair Lewis