SINCLAIR LEWIS QUOTES
American author (1885-1951)
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
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; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
I, who have heaved a good many bricks myself, would be fatuous not to expect a fair number in return.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930
He was permitted, without restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and socialistic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure, Presbyterian, and Republican.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
His entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
The Job
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
letter declining the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
The Job
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
The Trail of the Hawk
He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts -- figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
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
The Job
She was close in her husband's arms; she clung to him; whatever of strangeness and slowness and insularity she might find in him, none of that mattered so long as she could slip her hands beneath his coat, run her fingers over the warm smoothness of the satin back of his waistcoat, seem almost to creep into his body, find in him strength, find in the courage and kindness of her man a shelter from the perplexing world.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
I have faith in Faith, I have reverence for all true Reverence.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
The God-Seeker