Gertrude Stein
One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows.... Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.Collection: Knowledge
There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much particularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.Collection: Country
It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.Collection: Creativity
If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything.Collection: Dog
You never answer a question nobody does.Collection: Doe
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.Collection: Country
If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.Collection: Creation
In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.Collection: America
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.Collection: Plato
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.Collection: Art
You have to know what you want to get it.Collection: Inspirational
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.Collection: Book
A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.Collection: Emotional
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.Collection: Long
A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.Collection: Generations
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.Collection: Acceptance
Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.Collection: Trying
you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.Collection: Taken
As there was never any question there was never any answer.Collection: Answers
A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.Collection: Artist
This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.Collection: Real
If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.Collection: Classic
Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.Collection: Interesting
The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.Collection: Different
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.Collection: Art
From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional.Collection: Progress
Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.Collection: Passion
I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowingCollection: Thinking
When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.Collection: Dream
The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.Collection: Art
I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.Collection: Tired
Affectations can be dangerous.Collection: Dangerous
There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotsky and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.Collection: Country
An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.Collection: Flattering
Governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting.Collection: Government
If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.Collection: Use
Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.Collection: Strong
Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.Collection: Lying
The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.Collection: Character
it is a surprising thing that the largest city in the world should have a population as gentle and pleasant and intimate and considerate and comforting as a little bit of a place where everybody knows everybody and everything, but astonishing or not it is perfectly true and the inhabitants of New York are just like that, and they are like that and this thing is a delightful, natural and gentle and sweet and comforting thing.Collection: Sweet
That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.Collection: War
Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.Collection: Use
More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.Collection: Marketing
We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.Collection: Jobs
A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover. A at most. Saint saint a saint.Collection: Two
Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.Collection: Fashion
To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.Collection: Gay
I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it.Collection: Baby
Once upon a time the world was round, and you could go on it around and around.Collection: Once Upon A Time