Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”

“What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.”

“Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the worlds weight he had never chosen to bear.”

“My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

“I want to be able to do anything with words: handle slashing, flaming descriptions like Wells, and use the paradox with the clarity of Samuel Butler, the breadth of Bernard Shaw and the wit of Osca...”

“Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.”

“I don't think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. ...”

“He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on the walls.”

“I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says Im his ideal.”

“Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.”

“Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.”

“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”

“This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" ...”

“Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.”

“Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.”

“It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.”

“I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.”

“When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.”

“You dont know what a trial it is to be like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.”

“All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted wa...”