When I see a beautiful shell like that I can't help feeling a regret about what's inside it.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Whether it's something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday I must start out with an emotion, one that's close to me and that I can understand.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

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

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren't exactly people, they're a bunch of people trying to be one person.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a bunch of people trying to be one person.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren't exactly people they're a lot of people trying to be one person.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely—taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an guessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticence to some physical discomfort—of these she never complained until they were over—or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

You don’t know what a trial it is to be —like me. I've got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald