F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich booy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton. So I guess she [his daughter Scottie] can stand it. However, I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.

I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect. And it's these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.

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

It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.(From: The Freshest Boy)

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.(From: A Diamond As Big as The Ritz)

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase— 'I love you.' (From: The Offshore Pirate)

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

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

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.

I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking.

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.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.