F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

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

Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.

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

Tender is the Night.

Mostly, we authors repeat ourselves—that’s the truth.

Though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less of an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning… So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Her voice is full of money.

Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.