To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it - three minutes; to collect the data in it - all my life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged – the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

She was overstrained with grief and loneliness: almost any shoulder would have done as well.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Only remember west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The victor belongs to the spoils.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are no second acts in American lives.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald