Fitzgerald Quotes

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

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

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.

Robert Graves

As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes "are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity, charm, and success, and the more lasting moral values." Their creator did make that distinction, however, and so was constantly surrounding his characters with a mist of admiration and then blowing it away.

Scott Donaldson

Take off that darn fur coat!...Or maybe you'd like to have us open all the windows.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual «There!» yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.' 'The whole campus is alive with them.' They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees. 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.

Matthew J. Bruccoli

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself.

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

Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs that gleam and shadowy hair,Or floating lazy, half-asleep.Dive and double and follow after,Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,With lips that fade, and human laughterAnd faces individual,Well this side of Paradise! . . .There's little comfort in the wise.

Rupert Brooke

Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.

Truman Capote

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

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

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

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

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

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?

Bridie Clark

Are you exciting to be with... or are you boring like the rest of them?

Richard Finney

He called me his 'dream.' I guess now I've become his nightmare.

Richard Finney

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

Fitzgerald Quotes

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