Quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

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.

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 can't tell you just how wonderful she is. I don't want you to know. I don't want any one to know.

The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

I don't care about truth. I want some happiness.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

He's sensitive and I don't want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn't care about him.

How I feel is that if I wanted anything I'd take it. That's what I've always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven't room for any other desires.

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.

This is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding-- it's got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

America is a willingness of the heart.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

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

A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

Grow up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.

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

One should ... be able to see things as hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Writers aren't exactly people, they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief, and I tried very hard to die, but I seemed to bear an enchanted life.