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 more I want to be oblivious, the less I can be. Life and light will not let me be. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Action is character. - 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
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
For what it's worth: it's never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you're proud of, and if you find you're not, I hope you have the strength to start over again. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
But this can’t be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm—but to fat women? To bony women? To women with scrawny cheeks? - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. - 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. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Character is plot, plot is character. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. - 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
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
I found something! Courage--just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always. - 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
Optimism is the content of small men in high places. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward. - 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
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Writers aren't exactly people...they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person. - 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
The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
That’s going to be your trouble — judgment about yourself.(Tender is the Night) - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A fellow has to believe in something, Jay-such as the rottenness of humanity. - 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
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The test of a first-fate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish I had done everything on earth with you - F. Scott Fitzgerald
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing - F. Scott Fitzgerald
And in the end, we were all just humans.. drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness. - F. Scott Fitzgerald