Quotes from Sinclair Lewis

Paris, that feminine and flirtatious refuge from reality.

Prohibition had turned drinking from an agreeable, not very important accompaniment to gossip into a craze.

though I'm afraid, Mrs. Dodsworth, that you'll find our house too dreadfully bookish. Beautiful people like you are superior to books. You ought never to read anything--you ought only to live. You ought to exist imperishably on some Grecian isle amid the wine- dark sea, dancing in the sunshine.

He was irritated by her self-election to superiority; he was bothered by her desire to have this new suitor consider her superior.

But after a fortnight he could enter the lounge, ignore the human furniture, and rustle his newspaper with almost as much relaxation as he had felt in his library in Zenith. He was becoming accustomed to the home of the homeless.

My poor stricken country needs the co-operation of America. We look to you--and if you do not give back the glance we shall have to look to Russia.

So far as I can see, he brooded, travel consists in perpetually finding new things that you have to do if you're going to be respectable.

He felt like a man who has asked for a drink of cold charged water and found it warm and flat.

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.

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

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

Do you think it's so snobbish, to want to see something besides one's fellow citizens abroad?

If travel were so inspiring and informing a business ... then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers.

It Can't Happen Here.

I've never done a single thing I've wanted to in my whole life! I don't know 's I've accomplished anything except just get along.

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation.

A sensational event was changing from the brown suit to the gray the contents of his pockets. He was earnest about these objects. They were of eternal importance, like baseball or the Republican Party.

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

It is impossible to discourage the real writers — they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

People will buy anything that is one to a customer.

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

There are two insults no human being will endure: that he has no sense of humor, and that he has never known trouble.

His name was George F. Babbitt [and]… he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

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