The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.
You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.
Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.
There are no second acts in American lives.
Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.
Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.
Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.
It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.
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.
Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.
No grand idea was ever born in a conference, but a lot of foolish ideas have died there.
Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.
I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.
There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't.
Nothing is as obnoxious as other people's luck.
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.
Forgotten is forgiven.
Action is character.
What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon? And the day after that, and the next thirty years?
Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.
It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.
No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.
Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.
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.
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.
An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
The faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.
Speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.
A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.
Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.
The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.
Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known.
It's not a slam at you when people are rude, it's a slam at the people they've met before.
His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.
Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.
I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.
The easiest way to get a reputation is to go outside the fold, shout around for a few years as a violent atheist or a dangerous radical, and then crawl back to the shelter.
To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.
