F. Scott Fitzgerald

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Action is character.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

I hate careless people. That's why I like you.

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

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

That's the whole burden of this novel—the loss of certainties.

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

I left my heart in San Francisco. My father left his in a sanitarium. My mother left hers in a shoe box in the attic.

I wish I'd written 'The Sun Also Rises.'

I want to be a successful writer. I want to be a famous writer. I want to be a rich writer. I want to be a great writer.

All life is a process of breaking down.

I had a dream that I was a character in one of my own books.

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of an idea, was harder to utter – it was the graves of Massachusetts and the cherry blossoms of Washington, and yet it was still a young girl in a bathing suit, selling Coca-Cola on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

Forgive me for my grandiosity, and for my occasional bursts of self-pity.

I was a man who had lost his way in a jungle of books.

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

I'm not a novelist. I'm a short story writer. I'm a poet. I'm a playwright. I'm a journalist. I'm a hack.

It was not a day for dreams. It was a day for facts.