F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotations

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

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

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

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.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

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

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

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

There are no second acts in American lives.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

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

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

Nick, on the Buchanans: ""They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made

He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.

He had committed himself to the following of a grail.

His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people - his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God...and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented...Jay Gatsby...and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

...he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement -- discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

Either you think or else others have to think for you and take power from you.

Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him.

I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghosty heart.

Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor

The Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe

I know. Ive been everywhere and seen everything and done everythingSophisticated God, Im sophisticated!

I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool....You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow....And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.

If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name.

In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o' clock in the morning, day after day.

In two weeks it'll be the longest day in the year....Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.

Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock....his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made

Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing.

You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde

Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

A writer wastes nothing.

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against.

The bottle of whiskey - the second one - was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who 'felt just as good on nothing at all.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

He dispensed starlight to casual moths.

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

When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her-- she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes.

Look at that,' she whispered, and then after a moment: 'I'd like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.

He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

Her voice is full of money.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.