F. Scott Fitzgerald's Quotes

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

You can stroke people with words.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

Forgotten is forgiven.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

There are no second acts in American lives.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.