F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

484 Sourced Quotes

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
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.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness-and I dread responsibility.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
He used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
You're a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they've been frightfully neglected.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There's so much spring in the air- there's so much lazy sweetness in your heart.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

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 once liked me, didn't you?, he asked. LIKED you- I LOVED you. Everybody loved you. You could've had anybody you wanted for the asking.

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I think they're very attractive,' Abe agreed. 'I just don't think they're attractive, that's all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life—it can be a superabundance of interest...

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