F. Scott Fitzgerald Writing Quotations

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

A writer wastes nothing.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

Character is plot, plot is character.

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

You can stroke people with words.

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

Nothing any good isn't hard.

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find you have created - nothing.

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

Writing is eternal, For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent, And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe. As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin, So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul: The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture, And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed.

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.