“When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.”

— Gertrude Stein

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

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Gertrude Stein 160

American art collector and experimental writer of novels, p… 1874–1946

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“Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 2

“Explaining something makes it go away, so to speak; what's important is left after you have explained everything else.”

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“Reading is important, because if you can read, you can learn anything about everything and everything about anything.”

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“If creation is important to something or someone or is going to become important, then all subcreations of it are also important. Everything is important. There is nothing so unimportant you can ignore it or destroy it with complete impunity. Your senses are part of the "everything."”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Seeing is important. Smelling is important. Hearing is important. Everything is important and you have to look at, study, get involved with everything, and you have to believe what you find out, and test, and finally prove! None of this nonsense about not believing in fossils because God was just playing around in order to confuse us. If you ignore the evidence of your (dare one say God-given) senses, if you define myth as reality, and if you claim divine revelation allows you to destroy any part of creation, you have committed absolute evil.
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“All the things that happen and seem so important at the time, and yet you forget them, one after another.”

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“Nature is interested in only two things—to survive and to reproduce one like itself. Anything you superimpose on that, all the cultural input, is responsible for the boredom of man. So we have varieties of religious experience. You are not satisfied with your own religious teachings or games; so you bring in others from India, Asia or China. They become interesting because they are something new. You pick up a new language and try to speak it and use it to feel more important. But basically, it is the same thing.”

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“No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.”

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“And perhaps there is no advice to give a writer more important than this: — Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure.”

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“If you calculate the price of everything in this world, you will miss out on the real important things.”

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“When dealing with the press the most important thing to remember is that you have the right to remain silent, because everything you say can and will be used against you.”

Jeffrey Montgomery (1953–2016) American LGBT rights activist and public relations executive

[Woodhull Freedom Foundation mourns death of one of its founders, Jeffrey Montgomery, Levy, Ricci J., Woodhull Freedom Foundation, July 19, 2016, 2016-07-20, http://www.woodhullfoundation.org/2016/sex-and-politics/woodhull-freedom-foundation-mourns-death-of-one-of-its-founders-jeffrey-montgomery-a-leader-activist-a-mentor-and-sexual-freedom-movement-hero/]

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