‘One thing I have tried to tell Americans” she went on, ‘is that there can be no truly great creation without passion, but I’m not sure that that I have been able to tell them at all. If they have not understood it is because they have had to think of sex first, and they can think of sex as passion more easily than they can think of passion as the whole force of man. Always they try to label it, and that is a mistake. What do I mean? I will tell you. I think of Byron. Now Byron had passion. It had nothing to do with his women. It was a quality of Byron’s mind and everything he wrote came out of it, and perhaps that is why his work is so uneven, because a man’s passion is uneven if it is real; and sometimes, if he can write it, it is only passion and has no meaning outside of itself ... A man’s passion can be wonderful when it has an object which may be a woman or an idea or wrath at an injustice, but after it happens, as it usually does, that the object is lost or won after a time, the passion does not survive it. It survives only if it was there before, only if the woman or the idea or the wrath was an incident in the passion and not the cause of it - and that is what makes the writer.’
- A Conversation With Gertrude Stein, John Hyde Preston