Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I hope I havent given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

Its all life is. Just going round kissing people.

I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willow. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the creative temperament--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--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.

For what its worth: its never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life youre proud of, and if you find youre not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.

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.

I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.

My God, he gasped, youre fun to kiss.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - thats the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives - experiences so great and moving that it doesnt seem at the time anyone else has been so caught up and so pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

What are you going to do? Cant say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

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.

I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Oscar Wilde, I want to do the wide sultry heavens of Conrad, the rolled-gold sundowns and crazy-quilt skies of Hitchens and Kipling as well as the pastel dawns and twilights of Chesterton. All that is by way of example. As a matter of fact I am a professed literary thief, hot after the best methods of every writer in my generation.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.

Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.