F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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.

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.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

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

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

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

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.

Everybody's youth is a dream a form of chemical madness.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation the critics of the next and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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

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.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

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

You can stroke people with words.