F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes (242 Quotes)

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

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.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

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.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.

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.

You can stroke people with words.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams no through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man, knocking over the solid furniture.

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

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Action is character.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

He's a bootlegger....One time he killed a man who found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

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

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Life was a damned muddle . . . a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of--every one claiming the referee would have been on his side.

Gatsby wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

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.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

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.

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

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

The Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe