F. Scott Fitzgerald

The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.

It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them.

I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.

I might have enjoyed the company of a woman or two... Or three but that had never stopped me from loving you.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

It's all life is. Just going 'round kissing people.

Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.

Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale---and yet they weren't unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

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.

That familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists.

One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

America is a willingness of the heart.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.