F. Scott Fitzgerald

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning—

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Her voice was full of money.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.

There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

The very rich are different from you and me.

It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.

Life is essentially a cheat and a disappointment.

I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist.

I want to be a man, not a successful man, but a man.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

I have been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might be a good idea to sober up.

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.