Home > Author > F. Scott Fitzgerald
141 " 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
142 " I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Crack-Up
143 " If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it's clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , This Side of Paradise
144 " His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours. "
145 " 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. "
146 " Experience is not worth the getting. It's not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you--it's a wall that an active you runs up against. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Beautiful and Damned
147 " 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. "
148 " The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life "
149 " Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction -- Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No -- Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Great Gatsby
150 " I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again. "
151 " I wish I had done everything on earth with you "
152 " If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue. "
153 " And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life--not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Offshore Pirate
154 " Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gatsby Girls
155 " Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , Tender Is the Night
156 " A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ...He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist. "
157 " You're three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans. "
158 " They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two. "
159 " The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion. "
160 " Character is plot, plot is character. "