I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

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

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.

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

I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

Amory thought how it was only the past that seemed strange and unbelievable.