Sinclair Lewis Quotations

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.

What is love? It is the morning and the evening star.

Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.

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.

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.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we'll be funnier to look at than to read.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

There are two insults no human will endure. The assertion that he has no sense of humor and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

. . . she did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them . . .

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

a dictator with something of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain, a George Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward.

. . . being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism

Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service.

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.

The trouble with this country is that there are too many people going about saying, "The trouble with this country is...."

I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full of energy it hasn't any room for facts.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers... coax us, 'Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just wiser than you.' For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now — and we're going to try our hands at it.

Sleep with me sleep with my dogs-

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.

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.

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.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

Good Lord, I don't know what 'rights' a man has! And I don't know the solution of boredom. If I did, I'd be the one philosopher that had the cure for living. But I do know that about ten times as many people find their lives dull, and unnecessarily dull, as ever admit it; and I do believe that if we busted out and admitted it sometimes, instead of being nice and patient and loyal for sixty years, and then nice and patient and dead for the rest of eternity, why, maybe, possibly, we might make life more fun.

I love America, but I don't like it.

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."

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much - and like so well?

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

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.

You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now, General-just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns-'fess up! With your great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that perhaps-just maybe-when a country has gone money-mad, like all our labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes, so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real middle name, Mong General!

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.

Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things.

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.

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.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

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.

There are two insults which no human being will endure: The assertion that he hasn't a sense of humor, and the doubly impertinent assertion that he has never known trouble.

That nation is proudest and noblest and most exalted which has the greatest number of really great men.

Don't be a writer. Writing is an escape from something. You be a scientist.

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.

I was brought up to believe that the Christian God wasn't a scared and compromising public servant, but the creator of the whole merciless truth, and I reckon that training spoiled me -- I actually took my teachers seriously!

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth... Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.

The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.

When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant womenfolks, 'tain't any laughing matter!

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

Fortune has dealt with me rather too well. I have known little struggle, not much poverty, many generosities. Now and then I have, for my books or myself, been somewhat warmly denounced -- there was one good pastor in California who upon reading my Elmer Gantry desired to lead a mob and lynch me, while another holy man in the state of Maine wondered if there was no respectable and righteous way of putting me in jail.

People read fiction for emotion-not information

My objection to the church isn't that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too - think of how many are arrested for selling fake stock, for seducing 14-year-old girls in orphanages under their care, for arson, for murder. An it isn't so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires - though a lot of churches are that, too. My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities.

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.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live.

You have more people that love you than you know.

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.

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like the rest of it.

It might be the doing of Satan, in whom Aaron anxiously believed with all of his being except, perhaps, his mind.

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

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.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

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.

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

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.

I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

Winter is not a season in the North Middlewest; it is an industry.

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life's dark clouds.

It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.

She was snatched back from a dream of far countries, and found herself on Main Street.

It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

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...

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.

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.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.

Vast is the power of cities to reclaim the wanderer.

Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.