Gertrude Stein Quotes

"A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull."

"A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables."

"A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears."

"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."

"Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood."

"Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening."

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

"Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something."

"Hemingway's remarks are not literature."

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

"I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it."

"I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich."

"If you can do it then why do it?"

"In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is."

"It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true."

"It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself."

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."

"Let me listen to me and not to them."

"Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money."

"Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone."

"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."

"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."

"The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not."

"There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer."

"We are always the same age inside."

"What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?"

"When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that."