F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon—down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You'll find another.' God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you'? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores.

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
I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
If all your clothes are worn to the same state, it means you go out too much.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king-the élan vital-the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school...

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part-once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one.... Vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with gray-turning, gold-turning light. The Shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow, pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool, lovely day.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A writer's temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was strange to have no self-to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Modern life... changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before-populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and-we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher -- a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

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
I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit.

F. Scott Fitzgerald