Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

No, interrupted Marcia emphatically. And youre a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me.Horace stopped quickly in front of her.Why do you want me to kiss you? he asked intently. Do you just go round kissing people?Why, yes, admitted Marcia, unruffled. Ats all life is. Just going around kissing people.

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They dont. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesnt want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I dont want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other peoples luck.

I became bored - that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts.

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity, to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s [Joan Crawfords] next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we can think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his legion of decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33...but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes—so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children.

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.

I dont ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside of me there will always be the person I am tonight.

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.

no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

America is a willingness of the heart.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

First you take a drink then the drink takes a drink then the drink takes you.

One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Grow up and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three oclock in the morning.

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

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

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older—intelligence and good manners.