Can you help me find a quote by Gertrude Stein?

This is the only one I can find so far that even comes close.

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
― Gertrude Stein

I found this one by Gloria Steinem while on my travels.

“I do not like to write – I like to have written.”
― Gloria Steinem

I can find quotes about writing good sentences by Sylvia Plath and Ernest Hemingway but not Gertrude Stein. :-(

Me too! I even pulled out my books of quotations. :-(

What do you need it for?

I like this one.

Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
Denis Diderot

Not that it helps you Jake!

I have a writer friend who is fiendishly completing a manuscript, and I want her to slow down.

I seem to recall that the quote I’m remembering came in a discussion Stein had with another writer.

Here are 2 good quotes I found:

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences. ~ Sylvia Plath

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ~ Ernest Hemingway

But I’m looking for Stein !

HA!

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

― Ernest Hemingway

I was just about to ask if this was the Hemingway quote.

I’m still looking for Stein. I know you want that one. Was it in an interview?

I know James Joyce once answered “Yes”, when asked whether he’d had a productive day…before elaborating that he’d written three sentences. But that’s James Joyce. This is the closest I’ve found by Gertrude Stein, but none of it is really what you’re looking for. How smart is your friend? Maybe you can con her into believing Stein was advocating people slow down in the last post in the link? Because I don’t understand that one at all.

@longgone Yes, the diagramming sentences quotation is a famous one, but that’s not it. That last sentence in your link is indeed a whopper.

@Bellatrix Yes, the Stein quote may have been an interview.

She was born in America but moved to Europe when she was still very young, right? Could the quote be easier to find in another language?

@longgone Stein spoke French and German, but she read and wrote only in English.

Ah…okay, that wouldn’t help then. :/

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
—Oscar Wilde

It’s obviously not the same quote, but it has a similar message.

@SavoirFaire That’s not it, but that’s an excellent quote.

James Joyce said, “Write as if every word cost you a shilling.” Again, not your quote but I had to throw my two cents in.

Also in the spirit of this question, Gustave Flaubert (Mme Bovary) obsessed not only about the perfect sentence but the perfect word, hence the term le mot juste.

“Flaubert scrupulously avoided the inexact, the abstract, the vaguely inapt expression which is the bane of ordinary methods of composition; he never allowed a cliché to pass him. In a letter to George Sand he said that he spends his time “trying to write harmonious sentences, avoiding assonances.”

Flaubert believed in, and pursued, the principle of finding “le mot juste” (“the right word”), which he considered as the key mean to achieve quality in literary art He worked in sullen solitude — sometimes occupying a week in the completion of one page — never satisfied with what he had composed…” Source

Maybe Stein said,

“A sentence is a sentence is a sentence”?