Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'm not sentimental--I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.

I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.

It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbour's as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

Oh, Joe, can't producers ever be wrong? I'm a good writer—honest. I thought you were going to play fair.

Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.

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

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

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 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.

I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.

Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know--because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

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.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go by 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.

He repeated to himself an old French proverb that he had made up that morning.

At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.

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

He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.