F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once a change of direction has begun, even though it's the wrong one, it still tends to clothe itself as thoroughly in the appurtenances of Tightness as if it had been a natural all along.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader's mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don't understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I've noticed that the children of other nations always seem precocious. That's because the strange manners of their elders have caught our attention most and the children echo those manners enough to seem like their parents.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power-at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Let's borrow life preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is difficult for young people to live things down. We will tolerate vice, grand larceny and the quieter forms of murder in our contemporaries... but our children's friends must show a blank service record.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I have never wished there was a God to call on- I have often wished there was a God to thank.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm restless. My whole generation is restless. I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I'd not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man's son an automobile.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I've given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I've had prima donnas break $10,000 engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make my guests go home.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes-but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
But I always felt that I'd rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a few days I'll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod-always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults-rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I didn't realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby [is] my imaginary eldest brother.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, and tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven't a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody....

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style.... I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fairies: Nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald