Gertrude Stein - The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

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[Ezra Pound] was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of the inner and outer reality. She has reproduced simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associacional emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should never be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry and prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.

Gertrude Stein
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.

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

Gertrude Stein
She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

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

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

Gertrude Stein
Remarks are not literature [said to Hemingway].

Gertrude Stein