Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was an American writer, art collector, hostess, and self-proclaimed genius. Scholars consider her literary output noteworthy because her approach brought modernism to its reasonable extreme.
Born in Pittsburgh into a wealthy and intellectual family of German-Jewish origin, Stein abandoned medical studies before she settled in Paris in 1903. She returned to America on one occasion for a 1934 lecture tour. Her Parisian residence at 27 rue de Fleurus became famous as a literary and artistic salon during the 1920s and 1930s. As the focal point of the avant-garde in literature, art, music, and drama, Stein attracted not only painters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, but also writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Sherwood Anderson.
Stein developed an esoteric stream-of-consciousness literary style, which, she claimed, was a literary counterpart of what she saw the great modern painters achieving with Cubism. Her writings are often obscure in form, unpunctuated, and focus on the rhythm and sound of words instead of their meaning.
Of Stein’s numerous short stories, novels, poems, operas, plays, essays, art criticism, lectures, autobiographies, and diaries, only two works have endured. Her first published book, Three Lives (1909,) examines the tedious details of the lives of three American working-class women. The best-known and the most accessible of her many books is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933,) which is her autobiography, composed as though by her longtime secretary and companion, Miss Toklas (1877–1967.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by 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
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: Mistakes, Risk-taking, Worry
One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Maturity
The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Animals
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
What is the answer? [Silence] In that case, what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Last Words
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Information, Common Sense
Let me listen to myself and not to them.
—Gertrude Stein
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Courage, Anger, Anxiety, Fear
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
—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
Topics: Genius
The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
—Gertrude Stein
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Audiences
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
It is inevitable when one has a great need of something, one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.
—Gertrude Stein
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
Remarks are not literature.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Literature, Books
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
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, Artists
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
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
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: Desires, Desire
One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
—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: Future, The 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
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
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
Rose is a rose is a rose.
—Gertrude Stein
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
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
I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.
—Gertrude Stein
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Money
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Communism
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
What is the answer? she asked, and when no answer came she laughed and said: Then, what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
Money is always there but the pockets change.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Money
Let me listen to me and not to them.
—Gertrude Stein
Topics: Being Ourselves, Confidence, Self-reliance
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