F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

Action is character.

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

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

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

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

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

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.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

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

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

There are no second acts in American lives.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

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

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

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

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.

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

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.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

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.

Forgotten is forgiven.