Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

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


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


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.

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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.


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


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.

Two extracts from S. Lewis

*There was but the hum of motor tires crunching the road, the creak of a rocker on the Howlands' porch, the slap of a hand attacking a mosquito, a heat-weary conversation starting and dying, the precise rhythm of crickets, the thud of moths against the screen--sounds that were a distilled silence. It was a street beyond the end of the world, beyond the boundaries of hope. Though she should sit here forever, no brave procession, no one who was interesting, would be coming by.

From Main Street


*Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to.

From Babbitt