F Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
― 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.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Human sympathy has its limits.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald (letter to his daughter)

“It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“You’ll understand why storms are named after people.”
― F Scott Fitzgerald

“I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It's worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper's ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them -”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“They had created themselves together, and they always saw themselves, their youth, their love, their lost youth and lost love, their failures and memories, as a sort of living fiction.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal

“There's only one lesson to be learned form life, anyway," interrupted Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.
"What's that?" demanded Maury sharply.
"That there's no lesson to be learned from life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bight and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the secret is exposed at last; the panes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such famous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“...'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

“You can't live forever; you can't live forever.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.”
― Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her

“Daddy's girl. Was it a 'itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Oooooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn't she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitably became inevitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis - these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis'. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting eyes of a boarding school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis' and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered: his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the "St. Regis' Tattler"; it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“In this couple defects were multiplied, as if by a dangerous doubling; weakness fed upon itself without a counterstrength and they were trapped, defaults, mutually committed, left holes everywhere in their lives. When you read their letters to each other it is often necessary to consult the signature in order to be sure which one has done the writing. Their tone about themselves, their mood, is the fatal one of nostalgia--a passive, consuming, repetitive poetry. Sometimes one feels even its most felicitious and melodious moments are fixed, rigid in experession, and that their feelings have gradually merged with their manner, fallen under the domination of style. Even in their suffering, so deep and beyond relief, their tonal memory controls the words, shaping them into the Fitzgerald tune, always so regretful, regressive, and touched with a careful felicity.”
― Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal

“Like distant music these words that he had written years before were borne towards him from the past.”
― James Joyce, The Dead

“EFFERVESCENCE AND EVANESCENCE

We've found this Scott Fitzgerald chap
A chipper charming child;
He's taught us how the flappers flap,
And why the whipper-snappers snap,
What makes the women wild.
But now he should make haste to trap
The ducats in his dipper.
The birds that put him on the map
Will shortly all begin to rap
And flop to something flipper.”
― Keith Preston, Splinters

“The family were wild," she said suddenly. "They tried to marry me off. And then when I'd begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something"—her eyes went skyward exultantly—"I found something!"

Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.

“Courage—just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage—the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more—I used to make men take me to prize-fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people's opinions—just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way—Did you bring up the cigarettes?"

He handed one over and held a match for her silently.

"Still," Ardita continued, "the men kept gathering—old men and young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring to have me—to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I'd built up round me. Do you see?"

"Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized."

"Never!"

She sprang to the edge, poised or a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.

Her voice floated up to him again.

"And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life—not only over-riding people and circumstances but over-riding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things."

She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back, appeared on his level.

"All very well," objected Carlyle. "You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that's gray and lifeless."

She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock.

"I don't want to sound like Pollyanna," she began, "but you haven't grasped me yet. My courage is faith—faith in the eternal resilience of me—that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide—not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often—and the female hell is deadlier than the male."

"But supposing," suggested Carlyle, "that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?"

Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.

"Why," she called back, "then I'd have won!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Offshore Pirate

“[About Ernest Hemingway] He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“He never had time to read on the outside, but here he joins a book club where they discuss The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is The Night with a fervent young professor who seems unaware that anyone other than F. Scott Fitzgerald has ever written a book.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel

“I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

“Dear readers, a long time ago the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald had written about writers not being people exactly, but a whole lot of people trying to be one.

I would like to take his philosophy further by stating that in fact these different people who live inside a writer's mind lead to believe it or not dearest readers - sometimes to pure ecstasy and sometimes to serious fights akin to a World War. Not to forget the innumerable dilemmas, catch 22 situations.

While one day the writer could wake up to a feeling of perfect harmony with Frank Sinatra's songs playing in the background of his mind, some other morning he wakes up with a feeling of mental catastrophe.

One afternoon the democratic type gets into a confrontation with the communist type. And one fine evening the timid, mild and gentle type gets into a tussle with the downright belligerent and war mongering type.

So my dear readers understand the situation before hand about my writings. You will definitely find me unpredictable.

But then I am after all a writer. And a writer should also not be predictable.”
― Avijeet Das