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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

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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
Novelist
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Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
World
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War
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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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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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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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Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
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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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She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
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Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
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When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag.
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People will buy anything that is one to a customer.
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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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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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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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There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
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There are so many people in the world who are eager to do for you things that you do not wish done, provided only that you will do for them things that you don't wish to do.
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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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Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
Sinclair Lewis