F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day."
133 Quotes
"I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretense of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me had become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations -- with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country -- contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome toward hardness -- hating the night when I couldn't sleep and hating the day because it went toward night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I have lived so long within the circle of this book [Tender Is The Night] and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds...it is an absolute fact---so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I mean the women who, without any of the prerogatives of youth and beauty, demand continual slavery from their men... They sit back complacently and watch their husbands slave for them; and, without furnishing any of the pleasantries of life for their husbands, they demand the sort of continual attention that a charming fiancée might get... They are harridans and shrews who continually nag and scold until the men are driven idiotic."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"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
"Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Writers aren't exactly people... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The important thing is that you should not argue with them [Communists]... Whatever you say, they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind, ‘Fascist,’ ‘Liberal,’ ‘Trotskyist,’ and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Communism as I see it has no place in the United States, and the American people will not stand for its teachings."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world... The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The clean book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I suppose that there's a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook."
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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