Best quotes by the American Author F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
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.
I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
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.
I know myself, but that is all.
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.
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.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
Advertising is a racket...its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
There are no second acts in American lives.
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.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About
Go to table of contentsF. Scott Fitzgerald life quotes
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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.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald write quotes
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You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald ability quotes
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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.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald people quotes
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I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
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.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald wealth quotes
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Her voice is full of money.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
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Her voice is full of money.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
The Montana sunset lay between the mountains like a giant bruise from which darkened arteries spread across a poisoned sky.
The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
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.
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.
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.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.
There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
Boredom is not an end product, 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.
I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in the process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
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.
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.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not 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, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
