75 quotes
The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round.
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.
Tender is the Night (1934)
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.
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.
The Crack-Up (1936)
Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
He knew now that he had always been a fool.
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
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.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
The Crack-Up (1936)
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
Notebook L (1945)
I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.
People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man's duty to his family may make a rigid course seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness.
Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply - I was casually sorry, and then I forgot.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
There are no second acts in American lives.
Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.