Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Steinwas an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 February 1874
CityPittsburgh, PA
CountryUnited States of America
A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.
Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.
More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.
No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.