F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes - Page 5

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
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
. . . confirmed libertines don't reform until they're tired . . .
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
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
Breathing dreams like air
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
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
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
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
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
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
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
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
Human sympathy has its limits.
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
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I suppose that there's a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook.
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
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
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
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
Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself - art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights...There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky."I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.
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
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
Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
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
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
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 you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
You've got an awfully kissable mouth.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself.(Tender is the Night)
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
I learned a little of beauty-- enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth...
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
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
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
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
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
F. Scott Fitzgerald