F. Scott Fitzgerald
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.Collection: New
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.Collection: Morning
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.Collection: Movies
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Intelligence
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.Collection: Communication
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.Collection: Women
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.Collection: Art
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.Collection: Inspirational
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.Collection: Hope
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Respect
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.Collection: Chance
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.Collection: Romantic
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.Collection: Sad
The victor belongs to the spoils.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Family
Forgotten is forgiven.Collection: Forgiveness
To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
There are no second acts in American lives.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
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.
Action is character.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.
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.
After all, life hasn't much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
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.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
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.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.