Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.

I worship F. Scott Fitzgerald and I love his writing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald has an indespensible quote: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at once and still retain the ability to function'. Or, as I like to call it, 'O.J. killed his wife, and the police are corrupt.'

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s.

Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.

What is most appalling in an F. Scott Fitzgerald book is that it is peopleless fiction: Fitzgerald writes about spectral, muscledsuits; dresses, hats, and sleeves which have some sort of vague, libidinous throb. These are plainly the product of sickness.

How about your favorite book?" "This Side of Paradise by From. Scott Fitzgerald." "Why?" "Because it was the last one I read." This made them laugh because they knew I meant it honest, not show-off. Then they told me their favorites, and we sat quiet.

I had to admit that in his old-fashioned way O'Hara was still romantic about sex; like Scott Fitzgerald, he thought of it as an upper-class prerogative.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

I really like 'This Side of Paradise' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think it's a cool description of a character.

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks, you've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

The seriousness or otherwise of the subject matter is often irrelevent to the question of whether a book is any good. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote a great and beautiful novel which mainly involved shallow people going to parties in a rich guy's house. By contrast, all sorts of terrible books are published every month about men slaughtering people for no reason - a serious matter which, in itself, does not make the author worthy of serious consideration.

I’m not interested in teaching books by women.

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their “work” is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention. Why didn't I reread my F. Scott Fitzgerald sooner? I might have saved myself some time.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.

Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness or even the possibility of transcendence.

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard.

I very comprehensively studied Irving Thalberg and his biographies. He's who [Scott] Fitzgerald roughly modeled the character after. He worked for him, as a writer, when he was at MGM. And, of course, I revisited the novel and the politics of MGM and the studio system at the time and familiarized myself with the world. There was a great deal of physical and literary work that went into it.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

When you saw the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," that was Michael [Jackson]'s story write large. Born as an elderly person, Benjamin Button was, in the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and in the film starring Brad Pitt, he dies as a newborn child. Michael Jackson's childhood was one of enormous, prodigious production.He was a child prodigy, he was a wunderkind.

At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a kind of crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my life as a runner, and it was my belated, but real, starting point as a novelist.

...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

I'm writing songs about New York. A lot of them carry the names of neighborhoods in Long Island. Maspeth, Montauk. I'm getting into the idea of a F. Scott Fitzgerald-esque Long Island back when New York was...New York.

He remembered poor Julian [actually F. Scott Fitzgerald] and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."

I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love 'Tender is the Night,' and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.

The real story of our times is seldom told in the horse-puckey-filled memoirs of dopey, self-serving presidents or generals, but in the outrageous, demented lives of guys like Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, Scott Fitzgerald - and Paul Krassner. The burrs under society's saddle. The pains in the ass.

All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.

I'm a long time [Scott] Fitzgerald fan, as probably everyone in America is. And I've always been fascinated by that theme of, what is the price of the American dream and what parts of your soul do you walk away with? The conflict of art versus commerce was also very interesting to me.

The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.

Scott Fitzgerald is a sound you like to hear at certain times of the day, say at four in the afternoon and again late at night, and at other times it makes you slightly sick.

F. Scott Fitzgerald thought that prolonging his adolescence would protect his talent.

Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.