F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

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
Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't exactly people they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
America is a willingness of the heart.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I don't ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s [Joan Crawford's] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
No," interrupted Marcia emphatically. "And you're a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me."Horace stopped quickly in front of her."Why do you want me to kiss you?" he asked intently. "Do you just go round kissing people?""Why, yes," admitted Marcia, unruffled. "'At's all life is. Just going around kissing people.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm glad it's a girl. And 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
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building. And just as it had been tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza roof to take leave of the beautiful city extending as far as the eyes could see, so now I went to the roof of that last and most magnificent of towers.Then I understood. Everything was explained. I had discovered the crowning error of the city. Its Pandora's box.Full of vaunting pride, the New Yorker had climbed here, and seen with dismay what he had never suspected. That the city was not the endless sucession of canyons that he had supposed, but that it had limits, fading out into the country on all sides into an expanse of green and blue. That alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining ediface that he had reared in his mind came crashing down.That was the gift of Alfred Smith to the citizens of New York.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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 the beauty in the world.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
And then, one fairy night, May became June.
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
We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no day.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
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
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish.
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
It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf, muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man , more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road. 'How do you get to West Egg village?' he asked helplessly. I told him. Ans as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He has casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was appalled by West Egg’s raw vigour that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that eroded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whenever you feel like criticzing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven´t had the advantages that you've had.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.It is somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
...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
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. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm
F. Scott Fitzgerald
All thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: The man on the street heard the conclusions of some dead genius through someone else's clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over...We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them-
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person.
F. Scott Fitzgerald