F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes

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

You don't write because you want to say something; you write because you've got something to say.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There's no other definition of it.

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

Listen, little Elia: draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I'll tell you a story.

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

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

After all, the portrait of an old shoe by Van Gogh hangs in the Louvre, but where is there a portrait of Van Gogh by an old shoe?

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.

Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.

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.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once.

But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

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

Nothing any good isn't hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly?

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

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

Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …

I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Her voice is full of money.

They’re a rotten crowd. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning—

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.