299 Quotes by Sinclair Lewis

Writers kid themselves-about themselves and other people. Take the talk about writing methods. Writing is just work-there’s no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type with your toes-it is just work.

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.

Indians, of course, have no “theology,” and indeed no word for the system of credulity in which the white priests arrange for God, who must be entirely bewildered by it, a series of excuses for his failures.

In America the Struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor.

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would’ve taken the most intelligent man five or six hours – that is, five minutes of speech and the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having to utter such shameless rot...

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart.

Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics! I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis.

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