Gertrude Stein

[from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 1933]

As Pablo [Picasso] once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when they others make it. . . .

She had come to like posing, the long still hours followed by a long dark walk intensified the concentration with which she was creating her sentences. The sentences of which Marcel Brion, the french critic has written, by exactitude, austerity, absence of variety in light and shade, by refusal of the use of the subconscious Gertrude Stein achieves a symmetry which has a close analogy to the musical fugue of Bach.

[CP: Brion failed to appreciate Stein and Bach?]