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F. Scott Fitzgerald
87 quotes
“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 (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Look here, old sport, [...] what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation – the test of a 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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notebook E, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)
“No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notebook E: Epigrams, Wisecracks, and Jokes, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)
“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you. (From: The Offshore Pirate)”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.(From: A Diamond As Big as The Ritz)”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It isn't given for 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.(From: The Freshest Boy)”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Isabelle Amorous (February 1920)
“It takes a genius to whine appealingly.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Maxwell Perkins, Villa Marie à Valescure, Saint-Raphaël, France, c. 10 October 1924, as quoted in A Life in Letters (1963), edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman
“I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Responding to a suggestion that he return to Hollywood to work on a script of Tender is the Night in a letter to his agent (10 January 1935)
“That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich booy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she [his daughter Scottie] can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Harold Ober (4 March 1938), in As Ever, Scott Fitz— (1972), edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, p. 357.
“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (July 1938)
“You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Frances Turnbull (9 November 1938), in A Life in Letters (1994), p. 368
“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 (1896–1940) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (5 October 1940)
“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 (1896–1940) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Alice Richardson (29 July 1940)
“How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (December 1940)
“Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notebook L (1945) edited by Edmund Wilson
“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Notebook E (1945) edited by Edmund Wilson
“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer's credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own. During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source