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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
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
Writing
Successful
Booze
Literature
Businessman
Living
Feeding
Artist
Decent
Bums
Left
Painter
Indistinguishable
Art
Countries
Attics
America
Picture
Shabby
Country
Writer
Spaghetti

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Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.
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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.
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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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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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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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You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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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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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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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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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
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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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We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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.
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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest it is an industry.
Sinclair Lewis