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
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
Topics: Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
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
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
Topics: Riches, Wealth
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, The Past, Memory
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Poetry, Art
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Art, Writing, Writers
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
Topics: Discovery
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Public, Career
Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Art
Being in love is great – you get a lot of compliments
and begin to think you are a great guy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Writing, Art, Writers, Authors & Writing
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
Topics: Thought, Thinking, Thoughts
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Heroes
I’m a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last; a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Romance
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
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, Bores
Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Socialism, Communism, Girls
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Despair
Life was a damned muddle – a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of – everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life
Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Madness, Youth
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
Topics: Religion
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Conversation, Speech
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
Topics: Suffering
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Failures, Defeat, Mistakes, Failure
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Personality
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghosty heart
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Challenges
The reason one writes isn’t the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Writing
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