A biography for Gertrude Steinhasn’t been written yet.
“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
“Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.”
“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
“Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it.”
“I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.”
“She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling.”
“Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.”
“It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.”
“Remarks are not literature.”
“Hemingway's remarks are not literature.”
“Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.”
“In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.”
“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”
“I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.”
“We are always the same age inside.”
“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 in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
“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.”
“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”
“Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.”