Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, aka F. Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

I'm a romantic -- a sentimental person thinks things will last -- a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.

Any walk through a park that runs between a double line of mangy trees and passes brazenly by the ladies toilet is invariably known as "Lover's Lane.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it -- three minutes; to collect the data in it -- all my life.

I've given parties that have made Indian rajahs green with envy. I've had prima donnas break $, engagements to come to my smallest dinners. When you were still playing button back in Ohio, I entertained on a cruising trip that was so much fun that I had to sink my yacht to make my guests go home.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

Once one is caught up into the material world, not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

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.

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.

There used to be two kinds of kisses. First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he'd kissed a girl, everyone knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of brags the same everyone knows it's because he can't kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

How strange to have failed as a social creature -- even criminals do not fail that way -- they are the law's "Loyal Opposition," so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.