Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

They wanted to know how I succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have a small one, yes all right the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really exciting and therefore it has the biggest publicity, all right that is it.

Gertrude Stein
College professors have two bad traits. They are logical
and they are easily flattered.

Gertrude Stein
After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it.

Gertrude Stein
Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting.
One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

Gertrude Stein
And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.

Gertrude Stein
I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.

Gertrude Stein
When moneys in a purse in my own pocket
It means wealth.

Gertrude Stein
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
Anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

Gertrude Stein
A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.
A creator who creates, who is not an academician, who is not someone who studies in a school where the rules are already known, and of course being known they no longer exist, a creator then who creates is necessarily of his generation. His generation lives in its contemporary way but they only live in it. In art, in literature, in the theatre, in short in everything that does not contribute to their immediate comfort they live in the preceding generation.

Gertrude Stein
Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.

Gertrude Stein
One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.

Gertrude Stein
There is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.

Gertrude Stein
In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.

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

Gertrude Stein
Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.

Gertrude Stein
Just before she [Stein] 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
I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite, or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should we want to lose being a Negro... I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong names and so let us keep them.

Gertrude Stein
There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.

Gertrude Stein
Of Oakland, California:
There is no there there.

Gertrude Stein
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.

Gertrude Stein
She reads anything and everything and even now hates to be disturbed and above all however often she has read a book and however foolish the book may be no one must make fun of it or tell her how it goes on. It is still as it always was real to her.

Gertrude Stein
After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

Gertrude Stein
What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

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

Gertrude Stein