Who is F Scott Fitzgerald
F Scott Fitzgerald, the legendary American novelist was born on the 24th September 1896 and died on the 21st December 1940. He was a prolific writer of not only novels but essays, scripts and short stories. Born in Minnesota and raised in New York, he attended Princeton University before dropping out to join the army in 1917.
His first successful work was This Side of Paradise, published in 1920 and shortly after, he married a wealthy socialite, later said to be the inspiration behind The Great Gatsby. His travels around Europe and interaction with the Lost Generation of modernist writers inspired his further work, increasing his popularity and status in the United States. His most famous work, The Great Gatsby was published in 1925 and continued his obsession with the excess of the Jazz Age. Whilst not a massive hit at the time, this novel is now widely viewed as an American classic.
Sadly, his works struggled to sell in his later life and then combined with mental health issues and alcoholism, he passed away in 1940. It is only posthumously that he has truly been heralded as a great of literature and his books continue to be taught in schools around the world.
F Scott Fitzgerald Quotes
1.First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
2.Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
3.A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
4.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.
5.Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
6.There are no second acts in American lives.
7.A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
8.I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
9.Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
10.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.
11.It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.
12.Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.
13.Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
14.There are no second acts in American lives.
15.A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
16.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.
17.Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
18.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.
19.A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
20.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.
21.No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.
22.Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you’ll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all
23.All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
24.Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
25.After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
26.To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
27.Action is character.
28.Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
29.What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
30.No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
31.For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
32.Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
33.I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
34.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.
35.The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
36.Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
37.Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
38.It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.
39.You can stroke people with words.
40.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.
41.Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
42.I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
43.Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
44.No decent career was ever founded on a public.
45.When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
46.His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
47.It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
48.At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
49.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.
50.Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
51.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.
52.The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
53.Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
54.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.
55.Only remember west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
56.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.
57.Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
58.To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
59.There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
