Gertrude Stein

. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

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.

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.

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.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

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.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.

Any time is the time to make a poem.

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want_x000D_ to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

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

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do 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.