Money is always there but the pockets change.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Money
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Courage, Anxiety, Right, Anger, Fear
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
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
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
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
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Audiences
Remarks are not literature.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Literature, Books
Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Thankfulness
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: Philosophers, Philosophy
The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Animals
I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.
—Gertrude Stein
What is the answer? [Silence] In that case, what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Last Words, Famous Last Words
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
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: Art, Arts, Artists
Let me listen to me and not to them.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Confidence, Being Ourselves, Self-reliance
One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Public opinion
If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.
—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
One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Maturity
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
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
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
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Imitation
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: Risk-taking, Mistakes, Worry
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
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Communism, Socialism
What is the answer? she asked, and when no answer came she laughed and said: Then, what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
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: The Future, Future
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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Susan Sontag American Writer, Philosopher
- Natalie Clifford Barney American Literary Figure
- Celia Thaxter American Poet
- Robin Morgan American Author
- 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
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