Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

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

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

Forgotten is forgiven.

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

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.

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

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

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

You can stroke people with words.

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

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

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

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.

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

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.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

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.

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

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.

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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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.

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

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.