Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You dont write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”

“In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o clock in the morning, day after day.”

“The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.”

“Writers arent exactly people...theyre a whole lot of people trying to be one person.”

“Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.”

“Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.”

“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.”

“It takes a genius to whine appealingly.”

“Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.”

“Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.”

“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.”

“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And its these things Id believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasnt all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”

“Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”

“There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind.”

“Nothing is as obnoxious as other peoples luck.”

“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.”

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

“[Gatsby] stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast...and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”