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Advertising
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Advertising is a racket...its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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Age
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There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. 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.
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/bernice/bernice.html
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernice Bobs Her Hair (first appeared in Flappers and Philosophers. New York: Scribners, 1922)
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, attributed
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America
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There are no second acts in American lives.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Authors & Writing
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When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school-masters of ever afterward.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Boredom
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Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
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City Life, Cities
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I wanted to get out and walk southward toward the park through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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Despair
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Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/obituaries.html
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, from Pasting it Together published in The Crack-Up, March, 1936
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Discovery
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For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Heroes/Heroism
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Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebook E, 1945
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Honesty
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No such thing as a man willing to be honest --that would be like a blind man willing to see.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Identity
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I know myself, but that is all.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Intelligence
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Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed. Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - 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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
http://www.thirteen.org/pressroom/release.php?get=1640
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, essay: The Crack-Up, February, 1936
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Kisses
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The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle, complimentary way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Memory
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It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, First published in Esquire (New York). Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number, June, 1934
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Men
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The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Personality
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Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Poetry
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Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Religion
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She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in the process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, bk. 1, ch. 1 (1920), said of Beatrice Blaine.
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Romance
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I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
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Suffering
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One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Thought
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Either you think -- or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Virtue
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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.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Wealth
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Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Rich Boy, All the Sad Young Men
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Books by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald