Genius’ was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable...

Man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.

It’s all life is. Just going ’round kissing people.

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the...

I’d known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I’d pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as...

Go on, she urged. Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.

Believe me, I may be a bit blasé, but I can still get any man I want.

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-

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

Take off that darn fur coat!…Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.

My hair– bob it!

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is blink.

Then she added in a sort of childish delight: ‘We’ll be poor, won’t we? Like people in books. And I’ll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!’ She stopped and raised...

If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll...

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

I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.

The grass is full of ghosts tonight.’ ‘The whole campus is alive with them.’ They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the...

The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of...

I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.

no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it’s every girl for herself.

Spend the glittering moonlight therePursuing down the soundless deepLimbs that gleam and shadowy hair,Or floating lazy, half-asleep.Dive and double and follow after,Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call,With lips that fade, and human laughterAnd faces...

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

Never miss a party…good for the nerves–like celery.

It may be that The Great Gatsby is as perfect, word for word, just in terms of English; but Ulysses is deeper, richer, wider – and is comic, whereas The Great Gatsby is a tragic...

My courage is faith–faith in the eternal resilience of me–that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high...

I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because...

As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald’s most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes “are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They cannot distinguish between social values like popularity,...

I found something! Courage–just that; courage as a rule of life and something to cling to always.

You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth.