Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The victor belongs to the spoils.

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.

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

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

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

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

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