Sinclair Lewis Quotes (28 Quotes)

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I can not understand why ministers presume to deliver sermons every week at appointed hours because it is humanly impossible for inspirations to come with clock-like regularity

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

People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'

It Can't Happen Here.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age.

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.

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

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

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

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

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.