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.
Interpretation
Writing is a straightforward task that requires hard work, not secret techniques or methods.
Sinclair Lewis highlights the notion that many writers often overcomplicate the process of writing by believing in certain methods or secrets. In reality, the act of writing is primarily about dedicating time and effort; regardless of the tools used, it fundamentally remains a labor-intensive endeavor.
In practice
In a writer's workshop when discussing the challenges of the craft.
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.
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.
There are dozens of young poets and fictioneers most of them a little insane in the tradition of James Joyce, who, however insane they may be, have refused to be genteel and traditional and dull.
The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
A lot of people insisted on a wall between modern dance and ballet. I'm beginning to think that walls are very unhealthy things.
My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.
If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.
People always ask me how I start a collection, and I tell them that I just look around. What am I tired of? What am I in the mood for? Real fashion change comes from real changes in real life. Everything else is just decoration.
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
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