Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age - a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age.
Here is a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald most inspiring quotes: Fitzgerald quotes about life, beauty, happiness, love and women. Quotes and sayings on writing, intelligence, friendship, romantic, love and affection by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes and Sayings
I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.
Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.
The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.
Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Can't repeat the past?… Why of course you can!
I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it's these things I'd believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.
And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know - because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
They're a rotten crowd, I shouted across the lawn. You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.
I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.
Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life.
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
I'm not sentimental - I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know,is that the sentimental person thinks things will last - the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't.
There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
It's a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
I don't want just words. If that's all you have for me, you'd better go.
It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
All I kept thinking about, over and over, was You can't live forever; you can't live forever.
So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.
I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
It takes two to make an accident.
I love her, and that's the beginning and end of everything.
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
Actually that's my secret - I can't even talk about you to anybody because I don't want any more people to know how wonderful you are.
There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him.
I'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires.
There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind…
His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
There is a moment - Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word - something that makes it worth while.
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.
I hope something happens. I'm restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.
New friends can often have a better time together than old friends.
Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world's weight he had never chosen to bear.
I'm a cynical idealist.
People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
You're the only girl I've seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.
Do you ever wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always wait for the longest day of the year and then miss it!
Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy - one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.
Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am to - night.
She was dazzling - alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.
You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known - and even that is an understatement.
I won't kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can't get rid of habits.
Strange children should smile at each other and say, "Let's play."
I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.
It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.
Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.
So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.
Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window.
The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain.
Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
I want to give a really BAD party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there's a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.
She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.
I'm not sure what I'll do, but - well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
When a girl feels that she's perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That's charm.
His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.
If you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them.
An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.
It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
We all have souls of different ages.
If I knew words enough, I could write the longest love letter in the world and never get tired.
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.
You know I'm old in some ways-in others-well, I'm just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness - and I dread responsibility.
It is not life that's complicated, it's the struggle to guide and control life.
Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes.
I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
why shouldn't he? All life is just a progression toward and then a recession from one phrase - "I love you".
In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.
Unloved women have no biographies - they have histories.
She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.
And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.
So we'll just let things take their course, and never be sorry.
I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.
You're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in this world, your imagination.
People living alone get used to loneliness.
Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.
It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.
Someday I'm going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving herself.
He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.
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.
There are no second acts in American lives.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
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