F. Scott Fitzgerald: Quotes about people

F. Scott Fitzgerald was American novelist and screenwriter. Explore interesting quotes on people.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: 822 quotes49 likes

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

“They were careless people… 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….”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Variant: 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.
Source: The Great Gatsby

“Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin - but they don't, even you and I…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

“It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Source: Gatsby Girls

“he wanted people to like his mind again-after awhile it might be such a nice place in which to live.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book This Side of Paradise

Source: This Side of Paradise

“They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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)