Quotes from F Scott Fitzgerald

I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. As usual, F. Scott Fitzgerald

If you don't like nice people, try the ones who aren't nice, and see how you like that!

he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gayety grew stronger.

Some men escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they've hit a sentence or two in a 'dangerous book' that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they're the congressmen you can't bribe, the Presidents who aren't politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren't just populate grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.

People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It's the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.

I've found my line- from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty- without this I am nothing.

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 dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something- most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning

A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.

He says unloved women have no biographies—they have histories. Anthony laughed again. Surely

I've always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.