Gertrude Stein Writing Quotations

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

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.

Don't write about what you don't know even if you don't know it.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

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.

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 to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

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.

If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.

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.

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.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

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

there is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.

I have heard Will Honeycomb say, A Woman seldom Writes her Mind but in her Postscript.

I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.