Gertrude Stein
What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.
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.
It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
If you can do it then why do it?
There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.
The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.
You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
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.
I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.
Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.Collection: Morning
You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.Collection: Looks
Whoever said money can't buy happiness didn't know where to shopCollection: Inspirational
It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your businessCollection: Business
In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.Collection: Morning
Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.Collection: Audacity
You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!Collection: Limits
Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It's a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.Collection: Being Yourself
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.Collection: Writing
The artist works by locating the world in himselfCollection: Artist
Art isn't everything. It's just about everything.Collection: Art
One must dare to be happy.Collection: Dare
How I wish I were able to say what I think.Collection: Thinking
You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.Collection: Inspirational
In America ... who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.Collection: Thinking
Forget grammar and think about potatoesCollection: Thinking
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.Collection: Communication
Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.Collection: Determination
Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Dog
It gave me a great notion of the credit of our present government and administration, to find people press as eagerly to pay moneyas they would to receive it; and, at the same time, a due respect for that body of men who have found out so pleasing an expedient for carrying on the common cause, that they have turned a tax into a diversion.Collection: Men
Every man is the maker of his own fortuneCollection: Men
If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.Collection: Ocean
... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.Collection: Real
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.Collection: Loss
War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.Collection: Dream
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.Collection: Father
Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.Collection: Success
Remarks aren't literature.Collection: Literature