Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Action is character.

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.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

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

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.

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

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

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

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

Forgotten is forgiven.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

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

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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.

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.