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Date of Birth
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03-February-1874
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Place of Birth
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Allegheny
(Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, United States of America)
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Nationality
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United States of America
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Also know as
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Stein, Gertrude
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Profession
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Poet, Writer, Librettist, Author
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Quotes
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- There is no there there.
- What is the answer? she asked, and when no answer came she laughed and said: Then, what is the question?
- 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.
- 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.
- Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
- Money is always there but the pockets change.
- Everybody gets so much common information all day long that they lose their common sense.
- 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.
- The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
- It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
- One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
- A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.
- Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
- Let me listen to myself and not to them.
- The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
- Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
- 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.
- 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.
- I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.
- Remarks are not literature.
- It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
- What is the answer? -- Silence In that case, what is the question?
- What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
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Gertrude Stein was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays that eschewed the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century literature, and a fervent collector of Modernist art. She was born in West Allegheny, Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, and moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life.
For some forty years, the Stein home at 27 rue de Fleurus on the Left Bank of Paris was a renowned Saturday evening gathering place for both expatriate American artists and writers and others noteworthy in the world of vanguard arts and letters, most notably Pablo Picasso. Entrée into the Stein salon was a sought-after validation, and Stein became combination mentor, critic, and guru to those who gathered around her, including Ernest Hemingway, who described the salon in A Moveable Feast.
In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream attention.
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