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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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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
Customs
Conventional
Criticize
Better
Live
Much
Think
Thinking
Scrupulously

More quotes by 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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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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Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag.
Sinclair Lewis
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Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.
Sinclair Lewis
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There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
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Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-
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.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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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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When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism
Sinclair Lewis
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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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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.
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.
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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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis
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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
Sinclair Lewis
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
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That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
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