Sinclair Lewis Quotes

Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist and playwright. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. Several of his most famous works are Main Street and Babbit. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith (but he rejected the prize). A number of his novels (Elmer Gantry, Main Street, Babbitt, Kingsblood Royal, and Cass Timberlane) were banned. Here are a few quotes from Sinclair Lewis.

• "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."
  - Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, Chapter 25
  
  
• "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
  
  
• "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, Babbit, Chapter 14
  
  
• "Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country."
  - Sinclair Lewis
  
  
• "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."
  - Sinclair Lewis
  
  
• "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 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
  
  
• "We have the power to bore people long after we are dead."
  - Sinclair Lewis
  
  
• "What is love? It is the morning and the evening star."
  - Sinclair Lewis
  
  
• "Whatever poet, orator or sage may say of it, old age is still old age."
  - Sinclair Lewis