F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

Conditions in the [movie] industry somehow propose the paradox: "We brought you here for your individuality but while you're here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.

Sometimes I don't know whether I'm real or whether I'm a character in one of my novels.

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired

People invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one.

One thin's sure and nothing's surer The rich get richer and the poor get - children. In the meantime, In between time...

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

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

He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.

America is a willingness of the heart.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

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.

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

The men--the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country.

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--

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase-- 'I love you

If you are strong enough, there are no precedents.

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

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

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.

The rich get richer and the poor get - children.

They're a rotten crowd', I shouted across the lawn. 'You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.

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

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.

It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.

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

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

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

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

he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.

I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.