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F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald , known professionally as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age. While he achieved limited success in his lifetime, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also authored 4 collections of short stories, as well as 164 short stories in magazines during his lifetime.

✵ 24. September 1896 – 21. December 1940   •   Other names Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald photo
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 411   quotes 47   likes

F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“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)

Feeling , Season

“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

Sense

“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)

Death , Wine , Reading , Dead

“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

Courage

“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
Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

Idea

“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

Art , Funny

“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

Question , Sport

“And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he has passed….”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Personality

“That Kitty was capable of any deep grief was unbelievable. He had gradually grown to think of her as something unapproachable and callous. She would get a divorce, of course, and eventually she would marry again. He began to consider this. Whom would she marry? He laughed bitterly, stopped; a picture flashed before him — of Kitty's arms around some man whose face he could not see, of Kitty's lips pressed close to other lips in what was surely: passion.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Thinking , Passion

“There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror — that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Life , People , Feeling , Sleep

“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

Notebook E, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)
Quoted, The Crack-Up (1936)

Life , Youth , World , Fools

“The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.”
“What is it?”
“That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Men , Truth , Idea

“It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Death , Travel , Home , Nature

“He stretched his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. "I know myself," he cried, "but that is all — "”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book May Day

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

War , People , Flowers

“The shadow of a dove
Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;
And down the valley through the crying trees
The body of the darker storm flies; brings
With its new air the breath of sunken seas
And slender tenuous thunder...
But I wait...
Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain —
Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,
Happier winds that pile her hair;
Again
They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air
Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Fate , Tear , Tree , Waiting

“In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: Quoted, The Great Gatsby (1925), ch. 7

Life

“I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Responding to a suggestion that he return to Hollywood to work on a script of Tender is the Night in a letter to his agent (10 January 1935)
Quoted, Letters

Hate , Sincerity

“Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him — he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Learning

“One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer "The Offshore Pirate." But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you'll like.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Personality

“They're all deserting me. I've been too kind. Spare the rod and spoil the fun. Oh, for the glands of a Bismarck.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

“Those were the days of "Florodora" and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period — the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Girl , Fashion , Wine , Heart

“There are no second acts in American lives.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

The Last Tycoon, "Hollywood, ETC.," ed. Edmund Wilson (1941)
Quoted

“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. But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to Isabelle Amorous (February 1920)
Quoted, Letters

Love , God , World , Courage

“John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades — a small town on the Mississippi River — for several generations.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Diamond As Big As The Ritz"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Family

“It takes a genius to whine appealingly.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to Maxwell Perkins, Villa Marie à Valescure, Saint-Raphaël, France, c. 10 October 1924, as quoted in A Life in Letters https://books.google.com/books?id=3DGy0rdeLrsC&pg=PA82&dq=%22It+takes+a+genius+to+whine+appealingly.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiC3b6sqp3TAhUm0oMKHXUBAXUQ6AEIRDAG#v=onepage&q=%22It%20takes%20a%20genius%20to%20whine%20appealingly.%22&f=false (1963), edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman
Quoted, Letters

“He doesn't believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

World , Feeling , Drink , Time

“Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter…
And the rain and over the fields a voice calling…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Laughter

“You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Letter to Frances Turnbull (9 November 1938), in A Life in Letters (1994), p. 368
Quoted, Letters

People , Learning , Time , Heart

“Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Life , Pain , Light , Grass

“Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On "The Lees of Happiness"
Quoted, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

Cry , Sincerity

“"Jelly-bean" is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular — I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Life , Personality

“I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Country

“In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

“But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Imagination , Books , Dead , Men

“Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Universe , Books

“So the men did, and they died.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Quoted, The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Men

“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 book Tender Is the Night

Dr. Diver speaking of Abe North.
Quoted, Tender is the Night (1934)

People