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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
Become
Writing
Sterile
Every
Obedient
Compulsion
Polite
Writers
Safe
Upon

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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest it is an industry.
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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.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
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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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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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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
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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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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.
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the shops, oh, damn their measured merriment.
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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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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If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
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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.
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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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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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