Quotes By Gertrude Stein

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

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.

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

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

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

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

But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'

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

There is no such thing as being good to your wife.

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

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

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

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

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

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.

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

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

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

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.

What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.

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

Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.

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

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

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.

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

If you can do it then why do it?