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
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: Art, Poetry
Optimism is the content of small men in high places.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Optimism
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: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers, Art
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
Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Life
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Speech, Conversation
You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Authors & Writing, Art, Writing, Writers
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
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Mistakes, Defeat, Failure, Failures
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
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
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Leisure, Rest
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Adversity
Being in love is great – you get a lot of compliments
and begin to think you are a great guy.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Perseverance, Endurance, Resolve, Health
Never confuse activity with action.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Action
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.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Beliefs, Age
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Past, Time, Hope, The Past
No decent career was ever founded on a public.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Public, Career
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
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: Memory, The Past, Time, Past
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
Her voice is full of money.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Wealth, Riches
Learn young about hard work and manners – and you’ll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Manners
There are no second acts in American lives.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: America
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
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
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
Topics: City Life, Cities
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
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: Bores, Boredom
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
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: Party, Twentieth Century
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Communism, Socialism, Girls
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Personality
Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Despair
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghosty heart
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Challenges
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: Hope, Intelligence, Ideas, Ability, Wisdom, Mindsets, Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Attitude
Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Idleness
Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Age
Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Topics: Wealth, Riches
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