The victor belongs to the spoils.

He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

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

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

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.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty.

It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life - it can be a superabundance of interest.