F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved -- in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

I was haunted always by my other life-my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day's letter from Alabama-would it come and what would it say?-my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream... I was a failure-mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.

And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.

She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of-“ I hesitated. “Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money-that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it.

Talk English to me, Tommy. Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole. But the meanings are different-- in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too. That gives me an advantage.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back anymore. The gates were closed, the sun was down, and there was no beauty left but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of youth, of illusion, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

Beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit.

Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.

There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people if he's any good.

One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.

Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call.

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.

It takes two to make an accident.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared-really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

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.

...I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

All things come to him who mates.

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.