F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896–December 21,1940) was an Irish-American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer.

Quotations

• "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
• "I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble."
• "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
• "There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice."
• "Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy."

The following quotations are from The Great Gatsby:

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• "Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known"
• "They are a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."
• "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
• "He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people — he wanted the glittering things themselves."
• "The poor son of a bitch."
• "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy?they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ."

Ernest Hemingway once said of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

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:"His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings"

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Hemingway is responsible for a famous misquotation of Fitzgerald's. According to the author, a conversation between him and Fitzgerald went:

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:Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.

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:Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

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This never actually happened; it is a retelling of an actual encounter between Hemingway and Mary Colum, which went as follows:

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:Hemingway: I am getting to know the rich.

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:Colum: I think you?ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.

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