Get the Quote of the Day from F. Scott Fitzgerald
That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.
In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
The only way to increase (writing style) is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry, which is the most concentrated form of style. I don't care how clever the other professor is, one can't raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level.
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.
Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
He's so dumb he doesn't know he's alive.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.
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.
Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
Can't repeat the past?... Why of course you can!
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty.
He wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was.
He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall... his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride.
God knows what you've been doing, everything you've been doing. You may fool me, but you can't fool God!
It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning-- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
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