Francis Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

Any walk through a park that runs between a double line of mangy trees and passes brazenly by the ladies' toilet is invariably known as "Lover's Lane."

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.

I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.

Shakespeare—whetting, frustrating, surprising and gratifying.

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow.

You can stroke people with words.

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.

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.

Action is character.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective equality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur.

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

Of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one.... Vitality never "takes." You have it or you haven't it, like health or brown eyes or a baritone voice.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

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

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.

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

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

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

There are no second acts in American lives.

Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

I'm a romantic—a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

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

No decent career was ever founded on a public.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

It's a mining town in lotus land.

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.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement—discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

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

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

At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it—on the inside.

The hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta.

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

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

The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.

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

Optimism is the content of small men in high places.