110+ F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes On Death, American Dream And Writing

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American author who is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Great Gatsby, which is considered a classic of American literature. His other works include short stories, plays, and essays, all of which explore themes of wealth, love, ambition, and the American dream. Following is our collection on famous quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald on love, death, american dream.

Top 10 F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

1. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.
2. For what it's worth, it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of and if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over.
3. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
4. And in the end, we were all just humans...Drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.
5. You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.
6. To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.
7. Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others.
8. You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.
9. It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
10. I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Image Quotes

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Quotes

• He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
• In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
• Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
• So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
• We all have souls of different ages
• There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
• Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
• Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
• I know myself, but that is all.
• No matter how low you go, there's always an unexplored basement.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Love

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately — and the decision must be made by some force — of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality — that was close at hand — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Death

I guess I'm the Black Death,' he said slowly. 'I don't seem to bring people happiness any more. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses- — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About American Dream

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him. — 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

The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

It makes me sad because I've never seen such--such beautiful shirts before. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can! — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Writing

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created - nothing. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Beauty

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal-- — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Life

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Romantic

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened - then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who had found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

You’re just the romantic age,” she continued- “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is- oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.” - Hildegarde — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love this simply because it's cute, and I guess it's a sign of the times in many respect. It's pretty much saying you complete me, only in the sweetest way possible. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About People

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important--especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About World

I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

It isn't given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven't a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn East and North toward them - this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Write

If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Progress was a labyrinth ... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it ... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution ... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nothing any good isn't hard. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Famous Quotes And Sayings

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Intelligence is measured by a person's ability to see validity within both sides of contradicting arguments. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God! — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don't say 'wife.' I'm your mistress. Wife's such an ugly word. Your 'permanent mistress' is so much more tangible and desirable… . — F. Scott Fitzgerald

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty−one that everything afterward savors of anti−climax. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he 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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

For what it’s worth, it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

It's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hope you live a life you're proud of... — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?... This yellow slave Will knit and break religions, bless th' accursed, Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves, And give them title, knee and approbation With senators on the bench. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Don't forget who you are and where you come from. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every act of life, from the morning toothbrush to the friend at dinner, became an effort. I hated the night when I couldn't sleep and I hated the day because it went toward night. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love New York on summer afternoons when everyone's away. There's something very sensuous about it - overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

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. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

that voice was a deathless song. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Life Lessons by F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald's works often explore themes of ambition, wealth, and the consequences of excess. His characters often face the consequences of their choices, whether they be good or bad. Through Fitzgerald's work, readers can learn the importance of being mindful of the choices they make and the effect they can have on their lives.