F. Scott Fitzgerald quote: "When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better."

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Forgotten is forgiven.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not hap...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without ad...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life — even rather romantic.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not a...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against ho...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my li...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoo...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she tho...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growi...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little foo...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Está bien", dije, "estoy agradecida de que sea una niña. Y espero que ella sea una tonta... eso es...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In the morning you were never violently sorry-- you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rat...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,
is that the sentimental pe...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elud...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the wor...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I know myself, but that is all.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Advertising is a racket...its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tr...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope t...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, c...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suf...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtl...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she w...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same t...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of the imagination.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the sa...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discip...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

No such thing as a man willing to be honest -- that would be like a blind man willing to see.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Be not the first one to quarrel, nor the last to make up
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thin...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the s...
F SCOTT FITZGERALD

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of th...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a chil...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like ac...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chose...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we h...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Chaque fois que tu te prépares à critiquer quelqu'un, m'a-t-il dit, souviens-toi qu'en venant sur ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a vio...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoo...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as di...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each oth...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There are no second acts in American lives.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying s...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he ki...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a qua...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me, you’d better go
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partial...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the sa...
F SCOTT FITZGERALD

He kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The decision as to when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other peopl...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Action is character.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Her voice is full of money.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy earl...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more t...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Always willing to lend a helping hand to the one above him.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that ac...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It takes two to make an accident.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

All I kept thinking about, over and over, was 'You can't live forever; you can't live forever.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not throu...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justifie...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne a...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put t...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sa...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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

Încercăm să ne alegem mijloacele și apoi luăm ce putem – și ne mai și bucurăm.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Douăzeci și cinci e prea cinică și sofisticată; treizeci e numai bună pentru paloarea excesulu...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that s...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, mo...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even tha...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in l...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, a...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come acros...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated b...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it w...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

My God,' he gasped, 'you're fun to kiss.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rare...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and sa...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

There!" she said, as she spread the tablecloth and put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it. "Don't...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I want leisure to read—an immense amount.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the worl...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It elud...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

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

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch ca...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven't h...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

They’re a rotten crowd’, I shouted across the lawn. ‘You’re worth the whole damn bunch put t...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own ...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a w...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

...he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a pu...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arran...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghosty heart.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the w...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

[Gatsby] stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment o...
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o' clock in the morning, day after day.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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