Happy birthday, Gertrude Stein! Here’s a selection of quotes from her marvelous writing:
“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.”
“Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”
“One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.”
“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”
“Laughter is not evaporating.”
“The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”
“[A] masterpiece […] may be unwelcome but it is never dull.”
“Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.”
“I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.”
“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.”
“If you can’t say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”
“You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don’t dance. So you might as well dance.”
John Madera is the author of Nervosities (Anti-Oedipus Press, 2024). His other fiction is published in Conjunctions, Salt Hill, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His nonfiction is published in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, New York State Council on the Arts awardee John Madera lives in New York City, Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.
