Quotes By F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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.

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.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Forgotten is forgiven.

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?

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

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

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

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.