Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald

About F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby (his best known), and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with age and despair.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into a picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when people do anything.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I learned a little of beauty - enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth - and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear d...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - form...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

He thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

One o’ clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man. Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Author Bio

  • NameF. Scott Fitzgerald
  • DescriptionAmerican author of novels and short stories
  • AliasesFrancis Scott Fitzgerald; Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
  • BornSeptember 24, 1896
  • DiedDecember 21, 1940
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Short Story Writer; Screenwriter
  • WorksThe Great Gatsby