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
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
it is all the question of identity. ... As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside.
Some men and women are inquisitive about everything, they are always asking, if they see any one with anything they ask what is that thing, what is it you are carrying, what are you going to be doing with that thing, why have you that thing, where did you get that thing, how long will you have that thing, there are very many men and women who want to know about anything about everything.
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.
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.
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is nopossible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear readers, are an after-thought.
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
Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
Well, she certainly hadn't a fair run for her money.
I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.