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

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
Writers
Safe
Upon
Become
Writing
Sterile
Every
Obedient
Compulsion
Polite

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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
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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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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
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We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
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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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It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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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.
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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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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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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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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!
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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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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
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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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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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.
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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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