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F. Scott Fitzgerald: 822 quotes49 likes

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to "succeed" — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

“This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the "Smart Set" in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book May Day

On "May Day"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“To Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed — it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“How strange to have failed as a social creature — even criminals do not fail that way — they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (December 1940)
Quoted, Letters

“As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“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

Notebooks
Quoted, Notebooks

“There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“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, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Rich Boy

"The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3.
Often quoted as “The rich are different.”
Quoted

“The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Mr. Icky"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Jelly-Bean"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to Alice Richardson (29 July 1940)
Quoted, Letters

“He read at wine, he read in bed, He read aloud, had he the breath, His every thought was with the dead, And so he read himself to death.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Tarquin of Cheapside"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

“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.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to his daughter Frances Scott Fitzgerald (July 1938)
Quoted, Letters

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Crack-Up

Notebook E: Epigrams, Wisecracks, and Jokes http://books.google.com/books?id=NIhKY8SpAE4C&q=%22No+grand+idea+was+ever+born+in+a+conference+but+a+lot+of+foolish+ideas+have+died+there%22&pg=PA123#v=onepage <br class="br">Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

“The victor belongs to the spoils.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Notebook L (1945) edited by Edmund Wilson
Quoted, Notebooks

“Look here, old sport, […] what's your opinion of me, anyhow?' A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925), ch. 4

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)