Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

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

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

No decent career was ever founded on a public.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

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.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

The victor belongs to the spoils.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald Quote