F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim, incalculable hours?

But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.

The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were--and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… .

Kiss me now, love me now.

In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

I talk with the authority of failure - Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.

It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future

If you are strong enough, there are no precedents.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

They had never been closer in their month of love, nor communicated more profoundly one with another, than when she brushed silent lips against his coat's shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.

You have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without conscience, you are just one of many thousand journalists.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.

He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.

When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

Human sympathy has its limits, and we were contented to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically when they read ... Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.

I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams

Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.

Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he's been building ideals around, and finds that she's just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

I am a woman and my business is to hold things together. My business is to tear them apart.

I know myself," he cried, "but that is all-

He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and café, wearing a dress suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

He felt married to her, that was all.

To most women art is a form of scandal.