A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
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

Action is character.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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

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

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

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


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

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

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Forgotten is forgiven.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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