F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Human sympathy has its limits.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Let us learn how to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead' he suggested, 'After that my own rule is to let everything alone'.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

For America is composed not of two sorts of people, but of two frames of mind - the first engaged in doing what is would like to do, the second pretending that such things do not exist.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Breathing dreams like air

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss.'It's impossible to be both together,' said John grimly. 'People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two...

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

. . . confirmed libertines don't reform until they're tired . . .

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. That- is the great middle class.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]....Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Communism...muat of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald