F. Scott Fitzgerald
Novelist
1896-09-24 – 1940-01-01
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer closely associated with the Jazz Age. He is best known for The Great Gatsby and for his portrayals of wealth, aspiration, and social change in 20th-century America. His work became central to the American literary canon.
Books by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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The Great Gatsby
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The Beautiful and Damned
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Quotes by F. Scott Fitzgerald
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This is what I think now; that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, a constant striving (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end--that end that comes to our youth and hope.
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Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man's world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.
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No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.
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That we shall use every discovery of science in the preservation of our children's health goes without saying; but we shall do more than this - we shall give them a free start, not loading them up with our own ideas and experiences, nor advising them to live according to our lights. We were burned in the fire here and there, but - who knows? - fire may not burn our children, and if we warn them away from it they may end by never growing warm. We will not even inflict our cynicism on them as the sentimentality of our fathers was inflicted on us. The most we will do is urge a little doubt, asking that the doubt be exercised on our ideas as well as on all the mortal things in this world.
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I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one's unwanted children. What a fate - to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers. ...Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings.
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I'll drink your champagne. I'll drink every drop of it, I don't care if it kills me.
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I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.
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I am glad you are happy--but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
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I want excitement; and I don't care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.
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My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.
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I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything.
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Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
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Courage is a sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.
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Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world's weight he had never chosen to bear.
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Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.
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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.
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Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– 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.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the impossible, come true.
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I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.
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Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.
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Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.
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