Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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.

Action is character.

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

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.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

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.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

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.

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.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

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

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.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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

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.

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.

After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.

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