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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.

Sinclair Lewis

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Sinclair Lewis
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Sauk Centre
Minnesota
Harry Sinclair Lewis
Intellectual
Dubious
Citizens
Dozen
Proud
Town
Virtue
Artistic
Word
Towns
Half
Achievement
Easy
Except
Priggish
Come
Ignorance
Highbrow

More quotes by Sinclair Lewis

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Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.
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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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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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Unhappy women are given to protecting their sensitiveness by cynical gossip, by whining, by high-church and new-thought religions, or by a fog of vagueness.
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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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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A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.
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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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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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There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.
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Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
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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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis
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NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
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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.
Sinclair Lewis