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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
Polite
Writers
Safe
Upon
Become
Writing
Sterile
Every
Obedient
Compulsion

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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
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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.
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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.
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That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
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It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
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When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
Sinclair Lewis
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In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.
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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.
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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.
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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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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
Sinclair Lewis
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His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.
Sinclair Lewis
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He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
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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