Upton Sinclair Quotes on Writing
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What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for art's sake' than a man on a sinking ship thinks of painting a beautiful picture in the cabin; he thinks of getting ashore - and then there will be time enough for art.
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I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.
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An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain
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I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.
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What Fielding was to the eighteenth century and Dickens to the nineteenth. Sinclair is to our own. The overwhelming knowledge and passionate expression of specific wrongs are more stirring, more interesting, and also more taxing than the cynical censure of Fielding and the sentimental lamentations of Dickens.
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I look upon Upton Sinclair as one of the greatest novelists in the world, the Zola of America.
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I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.