F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
- 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.
2. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.
3. Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
4. When you get drunk you don’t tear anything apart except yourself.
5. If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.
6. Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.
7. Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions.
8. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
9. I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything.
10. Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re born
11. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.
12. Compromising with events as time moves along.
13. 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.
14. Character is plot, plot is character.
15. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
16. I want to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally.
17. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
18. Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.
19. You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
20. It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life.
21. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever; you can’t live forever.
22. To be afraid, a person has either to be very great and strong– or else a coward. I’m neither.
23. Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.
24. I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway
25. People fall in and out of love all the time. I wonder how they manage it.
26. I’m merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence
27. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
28. What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
29. The rich get richer and the poor get – children.
30. A writer wastes nothing.
31. There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
32. Writers aren’t exactly people…. They’re a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
33. You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
34. 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.
35. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
36. 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.
37. All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.
38. An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
39. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone…just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
40. Selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.
41. Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances.
42. Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.
43. Action is Character.
44. I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.
45. Things are sweeter when they’re lost.
46. If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired.
47. The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want
48. Biography is the falsest of the arts.
49. 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.
50. Most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning.
51. Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
52. Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
53. You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.
54. 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.
55. Forgotten is forgiven.
56. 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.
57. I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.
58. I want to do everything in the world with you.
59. There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good.
60. 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.
61. Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
62. Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
63. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses.
64. Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
65. And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
66. When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it–and not get caught.
67. First, you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
68. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
69. Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
70. Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.
71. That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
72. Life is so damned hard, so damned hard… It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.
73. The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.
74. Human sympathy has its limits.
75. Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
76. We all must try to be good.
77. Happiness is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery.
78. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman.
79. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
80. I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
81. People living alone get used to loneliness.
82. 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.
83. I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.
84. The test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
85. I found something! Courage–just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.
86. New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
87. All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.
88. Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us.
89. 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.
90. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
91. Art isn’t meaningless… It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.
92. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but— well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
93. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
94. He says unloved women have no biographies—they have histories.
95. When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm
96. 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.
97. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
98. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in one of my novels.
99. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
100. Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.
101. I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.
102. There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
103. I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.
