Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Forgotten is forgiven.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

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

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.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.