F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes | GloryQuotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Writing

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

You can stroke people with words.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes About Life

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

More Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are no second acts in American lives.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Browse 63 quotes attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, listed in the source data as a American Author, organized around themes such as Writing, Life, Time. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.