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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.

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
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Minnesota
Harry 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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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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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.
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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.
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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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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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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
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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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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.
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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.
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What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
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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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That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
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