F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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.

Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed, at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream's shadow.

Debut: the first time a young girl is seen drunk in public.

And will I like being called a jazz-baby? You will love it.

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."

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

The things that'll make you fail I'll love always.

We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be. "Five years next November." The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy, and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

"What are you going to do?" "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink."

He felt married to her, that was all.

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.

Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot.

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

I don't like girls in the daytime,' he said shortly, and then thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: 'But I like you.' He cleared his throat. 'I like you first and second and third.

What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining." I’m glad Jay." Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties, and the unclear voices of children, already gathered like crikets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight.

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.

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

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

I've got an adjective that just fits you.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.

Let's borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.

He dispensed starlight to casual moths.

To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their (W/E Egg) dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

The bottle of whiskey - the second one - was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine, who 'felt just as good on nothing at all.

He lifted his arms to the crystaline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.

A writer wastes nothing.

Receding from grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there.

The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it.

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?

So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.

Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghost-like through the curtains.

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.

you once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.

I'm merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence.

Who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness?

He had seen me several times, and had intended to call on me long before, but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it.

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

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

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.

I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.