Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

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

Never confuse activity with action.

You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.