Quotes by Gertrude Stein

About Gertrude Stein:

Gertrude Stein was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays. Born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of the 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art.
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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

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

Gertrude Stein

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Gertrude Stein

It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.

Gertrude Stein

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

Gertrude Stein

Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.

Gertrude Stein

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

Gertrude Stein

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

Gertrude Stein

Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.

Gertrude Stein

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

Gertrude Stein

Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.

Gertrude Stein

A house in the country is not the same as a country house.

Gertrude Stein

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

Gertrude Stein

It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.

Gertrude Stein

Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it.

Gertrude Stein

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

Gertrude Stein

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

Gertrude Stein

If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

Gertrude Stein

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

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 i...

Gertrude Stein

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

Gertrude Stein

Author Bio

  • NameGertrude Stein
  • DescriptionAmerican art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays
  • BornFebruary 3, 1874
  • DiedJuly 27, 1946
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Art Collector; Salon-holder; Autobiographer; Librettist
  • WorksThree Lives; Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms; The Making Of Americans; Four Saints In Three Acts; The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas; Everybody's Autobiography; Doctor Faustus Lights The Lights