Welcome to our collection of quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Wikipedia Summary for F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and short story writer. He was best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term which he popularized. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he temporarily achieved popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald only received wide critical and popular acclaim after his death. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Fitzgerald was born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, but was primarily raised in New York. He attended Princeton University, but due to a failed relationship and a preoccupation with writing, he dropped out in 1917 to join the Army. While stationed in Alabama, he fell in love with rich socialite Zelda Sayre. Although she initially rejected him due to his financial situation, Zelda agreed to marry Fitzgerald after he had published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920).
In the 1920s, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he was influenced by the modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, particularly Ernest Hemingway. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him into the New York City elite. To maintain his lifestyle during this time, he also wrote several stories for magazines. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was inspired by his rise to fame and relationship with Zelda. Although it received mixed reviews, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some even labeling it the "Great American Novel". While Zelda was placed at a mental institute for her schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Faced with financial difficulties due to the declining popularity of his works, Fitzgerald turned to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he died in 1940, at the age of 44. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), was completed by Edmund Wilson and published after Fitzgerald's death.
It appears that every mans insomnia is as different from his neighbours as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.
Thirty the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
This midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.
The more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be.
It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realized what's changed is you.
We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the names become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth. It has no day.
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.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.
The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
Boredom is not an end-product, it is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
Life was a damned muddle a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
For what it's worth, it's never too late to be whoever you want to be.
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.
Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality -- he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would sell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor.
So before he left he made most of his life insurance over to us. That's in case he doesn't come back--those trips are dangerous of course.
I should think so, I said, especially with three anthropologists.
I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life -- and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.
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.
They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..
In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
It's always a delusion when I see what you don't want to see (Nicole to Dick).
This is worse than a calamity, he said dryly. It's getting to be a nuisance.
He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving -- but he could not have her. 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.
The important thing is that you should not argue with them. Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion, and whatever you say, they have ways of twisting into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind.
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it's carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.
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.
The garden of Dr. Harden was full of sunshine and bosomed with Japanese magnolia trees dropping pink tears over the grass.
A classic,' suggested Anthony, 'is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it's safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It's acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion.
I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.
Junior writers $300; Minor poets--$500 a week; Broken novelists--$850-1000; One play dramatists--$1500; Sucks--$2000. Wits--$2500.
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.
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 anymore.
She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life -- even rather romantic.
There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.
He put his arms around her, enclosing her completely as if he didn't want even the intangible to escape.
You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.
The sea, he thought, had treasured it's memories deeper than the faithless land.
The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land.
It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.
We'll meet you on some corner. I'll be the man smoking two cigarettes.
I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but i soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself.
Learn young about hard work and manners -- and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.
It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality--a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death.
She awoke often to lie and wish for that presence beside her--inanimate yet breathing--still Jeff.
He seduces her because she is slipping away -- she lets herself be seduced because of overwhelming admiration. Once settled, it is sensual, breathless, immediate, then gentle and tender for a while.
Anyhow, he gives large parties, said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete. And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.
In short, you have only your emotions to sell. This is the experience of all writers.
Why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase -- 'I love you.
Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world....The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
Prose talent depends on having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.
For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.
I've noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That's because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.
As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat's shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.
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.
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.
He kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away.
Most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling dream.
It was touching to see them together -- it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way.
He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud.
It was too late -- everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.
I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.
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.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know -- because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.
