Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine - courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing - can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warnings of ignorance and necessity.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Art invariably grows out of a period when, in general, the artist admires his own nation and wants to win its approval.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently a knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

A writer must find his own grain, way, bent. ... He aspires to create new and original works. His way is alone. If he succumbs to ideologies, he turns into a mouthpiece. He must hang on to his identity for dear life. In the end he must rely on his own judgment. It’s the only way to survive as a writer and an artist.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald