Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis
Harry Sinclair Lewiswas an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters." His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars. He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 February 1885
CitySauk Centre, MN
CountryUnited States of America
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.
Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.
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.
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.
It isn't what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
The middle class, that prisoner of the barbarian 20th century.
Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.
A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth... Sure of itself, it bullies other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.
The one thing that can be more disconcerting than intelligent hatred is demanding love.
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.
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.
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.