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.
Interpretation
Audiences expect authors to be more entertaining in person than in their written work.
In this quote, Sinclair Lewis highlights the inherent pressure on authors to captivate their audiences during live presentations. He humorously suggests that people hope for a more engaging experience than what they find in the written form, reflecting on the different expectations for literary and live performance skills.
In practice
In a speech at a literary festival, a speaker quotes Sinclair Lewis to emphasize the importance of engaging with the audience.
Upon this theology he rarely pondered. The kernel of his practical religion was that it was respectable, and beneficial to one's business, to be seen going to services; that the church kept the Worst Elements from being still worse; and that the pastor's sermons, however dull they might seem at the time of taking, yet had a voodooistic power which 'did a fellow good-- kept him in touch with Higher Things.
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
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.
She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.
Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.
It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.
98% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.
I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell.
Calvin: Trick or treat! Adult: Where's your costume? What are you supposed to be? Calvin: I'm yet another resource-consuming kid in an overpopulated planet, raised to an alarming extent by Madison Avenue and Hollywood, poised with my cynical and alienated peers to take over the world when you're old and weak... Am I scary, or what?
The worst thing about television is that everybody you see on television is doing something better than what you're doing. You never see anybody on TV just sliding off the front of the sofa, with potato chip crumbs all over their shirt.
The bigger the humbug, the better people will like it.
It's a lovely moment when everyone's part of something greater than the sum of its parts. That encapsulates what a comedy gig should be, with the comic as the lightning rod, the Norse mischief god, getting the audience to do something they wouldn't necessarily do.
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