American author (1885-1951)
Such poverty is not for the artist in America. They pay us, indeed, only too well; that writer is a failure who cannot have his butler and motor and his villa at Palm Beach, where he is permitted to mingle almost in equality with the barons of banking. But he is oppressed ever by something worse than poverty -- by the feeling that what he creates does not matter, that he is expected by his readers to be only a decorator or a clown, or that he is good-naturedly accepted as a scoffer whose bark probably is worse than his bite and who probably is a good fellow at heart, who in any case certainly does not count in a land that produces eighty-story buildings, motors by the million, and wheat by the billions of bushels.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930
American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
The content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven.... 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."
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
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!
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Elmer Gantry
He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
He liked three kinds of films: pretty bathing girls with bare legs; policemen or cowboys and an industrious shooting of revolvers; and funny fat men who ate spaghetti.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
In the study of the profession to which he had looked forward all his life he found irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he saw no one clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths far-off and doubtful.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it. And the most important part of experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate quantitative notes -- in ink.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Arrowsmith
Good sense from a child was not necessarily contemptible beside foolishness from a grown-up.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
The God-Seeker
Whatever the misery, he could not regain contentment with a world which, once doubted, became absurd.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
Your social standing isn't even in the telephone book.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Free Air
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.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Babbitt
She was not a Respectable Married Woman but fully a human being.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
It Can't Happen Here
We want our Utopia now.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Main Street
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.
SINCLAIR LEWIS
Dodsworth