Rose is a rose is a rose.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Aptness, Appropriateness
The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Identity
A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: America
The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Aspirations
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Communism, Socialism
It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.
—Gertrude Stein
What is the answer? she asked, and when no answer came she laughed and said: Then, what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Imitation
I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.
—Gertrude Stein
It is inevitable when one has a great need of something, one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Abundance
When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Sleep
What is the answer? [Silence] In that case, what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Last Words, Famous Last Words
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Common Sense, Information
Money is always there but the pockets change.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Money
Let me listen to me and not to them.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Confidence, Self-reliance, Being Ourselves
It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Men
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Audiences
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Courage, Fear, Anger, Right, Anxiety
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Future, The Future
One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Maturity
Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Thankfulness
We are always the same age inside.
—Gertrude Stein
If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Worry
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Reality
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
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Misery, Money
One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Public opinion
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Genius
If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.
—Gertrude Stein
I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Desire, Desires
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: America
What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
—Gertrude Stein
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: America
Let me listen to myself and not to them.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Independence
The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
—Gertrude Stein
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Class
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Worry, Risk-taking, Mistakes
Remarks are not literature.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Books, Literature
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Susan Sontag American Writer, Philosopher
Natalie Clifford Barney American Playwright
Celia Thaxter American Poet
Robin Morgan American Activist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman American Feminist, Writer
Sheryl Sandberg American Executive, Author
May Sarton American Children’s Books Writer
Mary Oliver American Poet
Muriel Rukeyser American Poet
Elie Wiesel Romanian-born American Writer