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"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile."
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"A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give."

"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."

"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be."

"I want the difficult stories, the ones that aren't easy to believe, the twisted ones, the sorrowful ones, the ones that need telling most of all."

"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."

"Good novel are written by people who are not frightened."

"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."

"More modern poetry is written than read."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

"I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else."
Explore more quotes by Sinclair Lewis


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


"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."


"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."


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