Gertrude Stein Quotes

You look ridiculous if you danceYou look ridiculous if you don't danceSo you might as welldance.

~ Gertrude Stein

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

~ Gertrude Stein

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

~ Gertrude Stein

It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.

~ Gertrude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

~ Gertrude Stein

I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing

~ Gertrude Stein

A FEATHER.A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

~ Gertrude Stein

I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.

~ Gertrude Stein

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

~ Gertrude Stein

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.

~ Gertrude Stein

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

~ Gertrude Stein

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

~ Gertrude Stein

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before

~ Gertrude Stein

It is very easy to love alone.

~ Gertrude Stein

Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it.

~ Gertrude Stein

She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling.

~ Gertrude Stein

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

~ Gertrude Stein

A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.(on Ezra Pound)

~ Gertrude Stein

Nature and man are opposed in Spain.

~ Gertrude Stein

At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.

~ Gertrude Stein

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

~ Gertrude Stein

The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself, but for a painter to be able to paint, the painting must first of all be done.

~ Gertrude Stein

nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen.

~ Gertrude Stein

If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

~ Gertrude Stein

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

~ Gertrude Stein

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.

~ Gertrude Stein

The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.

~ Gertrude Stein

When you get there there isn't any there there.

~ Gertrude Stein

You have to learn to do everything even to die.

~ Gertrude Stein

She always says she dislikes the abnormal it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

~ Gertrude Stein

Nothing has happened today except kindness.

~ Gertrude Stein

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

~ Gertrude Stein

Considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.

~ Gertrude Stein

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

~ Gertrude Stein

I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.

~ Gertrude Stein

We are always the same age inside.

~ Gertrude Stein

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

~ Gertrude Stein

I am because my little dog knows me.

~ Gertrude Stein

Let me listen to me and not to them.

~ Gertrude Stein

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.

~ Gertrude Stein