Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short-story writer who is famous for his vivid portrait of the “Jazz Era” of the 1920s in such novels as The Great Gatsby.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was named for his eminent ancestor, Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem. He joined Princeton University, where he wrote the lyrics for a few musical comedies. During World War I, he served as the second lieutenant in the army and wrote his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920,) which made him instantly famous.
Fitzgerald married the glamorous Zelda Sayre, and they embarked on a life of high living, big spending, and party-going, which characterized the “Jazz Age.” His next books, the novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and two collections of stories—Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)—became sensational best-sellers.
Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is arguably America’s most celebrated novel. It features a near-criminal, but impractical financier whose romantic and destructive passion for the greedy and self-absorbed Daisy Buchanan leads ultimately to his death.
Fitzgerald sustained his professional career partly by writing Hollywood movie scripts—most notably, he refined the screenplays for Gone with the Wind (1939) and A Yank at Oxford (1938.) He wrote one additional completed novel, Tender Is the Night (1934) and the unfinished The Last Tycoon (1941.) His personal life declined because of alcoholism and his wife’s mental illness.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Speech, Conversation
I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Youth, Madness
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
Topics: Boredom
I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Libraries
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
Topics: Men
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Optimism, Attitude, Positive Attitudes, Wisdom, Hope, Ideas, Intelligence, Ability, Mindsets
Being in love is great – you get a lot of compliments
and begin to think you are a great guy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Optimism
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Advertising
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Wealth, Riches
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Twentieth Century
No such thing as a man willing to be honest—that would be like a blind man willing to see.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Honesty
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Heroes, Heroes/Heroism
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Action, Genius, One liners, Ability
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
Topics: Past, Time, Memory, The Past
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