F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I'm with you, I don't breathe quite right.

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.

He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.

God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!

I hope I haven't given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.

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

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

It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.

To be kind is more important than to be right. Many times, what people need is not a brilliant mind that speaks but a special heart that listens.

Well, I can't describe her exactly-except to say that she was beautiful. She was-tremendously alive.

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

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

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering—this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners, as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.