F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
Most popular F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
Action is character.
Forgotten is forgiven.
The rich are different.
A stick hardened in the fire.
You can stroke people with words.
Unborn is tomorrow and dead is yesterday.
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
If you're strong enough, there are no precedents.
I had to sink my yacht to make the guests go home.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
Cut out all those exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.
This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
Only remember—west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbor's as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
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.
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.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by 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.
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.
The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
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.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
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.
