Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

About F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is 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 (his best known), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life -- I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those o...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for exampl...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, "a constant striving" (as those people say who gain their bread by saying i...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I don’t want to live— 
I want to love first, and live…incidentally.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: 'We'll be poor, won't we? Like people in books. And I'll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!' She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss. 'It's impossible to be both to...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea--if you gaze...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cock...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Who is he anyhow, an actor?" "No." "A dentist?" "...No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919." "Fixed the World Series?" I repeated. The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course,...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the se...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author Bio

  • NameF. Scott Fitzgerald
  • DescriptionAmerican author of novels and short stories
  • AliasesFrancis Scott Fitzgerald; Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
  • BornSeptember 24, 1896
  • DiedDecember 21, 1940
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Short Story Writer; Screenwriter
  • WorksThe Great Gatsby