F Scott Fitzgerald quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

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.

The victor belongs to the spoils.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

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.

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.

The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

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.

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.

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

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Forgotten is forgiven.

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