Quotes from Andrew Turnbull

Fitzgerald's attachment to those who had shared his time and experience here on earth, his sense of identity with them, his caring---that is perhaps the final burden and beauty of these letters.

Fitzgerald focused on you---even riveted on you---and if there was one thing you were sure of, it was that whatever you happened to be talking about was the most important matter in the world. A further seduction was his smile---quick, tight, and very appealing. It was not so much a smile as a flash of confidence in you and your mortal possiblities.

Literature was a form of intoxication, and many nights he read and wrote in his tower room till the cigarette butts littered the ash trays -- then wandered up to Nassau Street through the darkened campus for string potatoes and milk at Joe's.

The past five months of loafing had demoralized him, the underside of his creativity being a destructiveness which tore at himself and others. 'I should like to sit down with [half] dozen chosen companions,' he wrote Perkins, 'and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature.