F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, known professionally as F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist and short story writer, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. A fifth, unfinished novel, The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth24 September 1896
CitySaint Paul, MN
CountryUnited States of America
Baltimore is warm but pleasant... I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.
When a man is tired of life on his 21st birthday it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself.
Reporting the extreme things as if they were the average things will start you on the art of fiction.
So they were desperately in love and being desperately in love involves a desperate existence.
A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me.... I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.
No matter how low you go, there's always an unexplored basement.
Everything that begins, begins with blood.
What you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought.It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all, I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.
There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate.
The only way to increase it 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 farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?
The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.
I was in love with a whirlwind, so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.