F. Scott Fitzgerald quotes

Born
September 24, 1896 St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.

Died
December 21, 1940.

Occupation
Writer.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Action is character.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Forgotten is forgiven.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth, and I suppose for older people, the love of youth in others.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Only remember west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are no second acts in American lives.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

The victor belongs to the spoils.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald