F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

485 Sourced Quotes

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's the whole burden of this novel - the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same, everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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