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

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

...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

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

"I was counting the waves", replied Amory gravely, "I'm going in for statistics".

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Englishmen must have an island.