Top 759 Quotes & Sayings by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
Action is character.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
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.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
There are no second acts in American lives.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
Forgotten is forgiven.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.
You can stroke people with words.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.
It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
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.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
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