I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.
F. Scott FitzgeraldI'm restless. My whole generation is restless. I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I'd not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man's son an automobile.
F. Scott FitzgeraldHe hadnโt once ceased looking at Daisy, and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way, as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real.
F. Scott FitzgeraldThereโs a writer for you,โ he said. โKnows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.โ [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writersโbecause if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answerโstill it belittled him in my eyes. Writers arenโt people exactly. Or, if theyโre any good, theyโre a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. Itโs like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward tryingโonly to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
F. Scott FitzgeraldMen get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
F. Scott FitzgeraldA writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me.... I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.
F. Scott Fitzgerald