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.

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.

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

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.

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

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

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.

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

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.

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

The victor belongs to the spoils.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

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

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

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that and the next thirty years?

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

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

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.

Forgotten is forgiven.

I'm a romantic, a sentimental person thinks things will last a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

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.

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

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.

To write it it took three months, to conceive it three minutes, to collect the data in it all my life.

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

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.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

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

No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

There are no second acts in American lives.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

Riches have never fascinated me unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.