F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can't, shan't be the setting - it's going to be the performance, the lively, lovely, glamorous performance, and the world shall be the scenery.

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.

I'm not much like myself any more.

She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one - the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Dear, don't think of getting out of bed yet. I've always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous.

Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay.

I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.

Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish, and all the writers, keenly interested in human welfare whom I know, laugh at the prohibition law.

Learn young about hard work and manners - and you'll be through the whole dirty mess and nicely dead again before you know it.

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

You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.

There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings.

He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms.

New York had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him — as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor