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
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.
Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
Character is plot, plot is character.
I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.
A writer wastes nothing.
The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.
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.
Writing is eternal, For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent, And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe. As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin, So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul: The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture, And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed.
Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.
I'm one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven't the patience to write books; and I never met a man I'd marry. However, I'm only eighteen.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.