Scott Fitzgerald Quotes

“Fitzgerald focused on you---even riveted on you---and if there was one thing you were sure of, it was that whatever you happened to be talking about was the most important matter in the world. A further seduction was his smile---quick, tight, and very appealing. It was not so much a smile as a flash of confidence in you and your mortal possiblities.”
― Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald

“Now was the time of hospitals, nurses, night sweats, sedatives, and despair. Fitzgerald seemed to be slipping back into the morass of 1935-6. Half-crazed with worry and isolation, he was also blocked in his work, and 'a writer not writing,' he once remarked, 'is practically a maniac within himself.”
― Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald

“The past five months of loafing had demoralized him, the underside of his creativity being a destructiveness which tore at himself and others. 'I should like to sit down with [half] dozen chosen companions,' he wrote Perkins, 'and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature.”
― Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald

“But Fitzgerald, the ironist, saw another side to it. What if he had won Genevra? He now wrote a story for the Nassau Lit, 'The Pierian Spring and the Last Straw,' in which an author wins his lost love and the fulfillment destroys his desire to write. He spends the rest of his days playing mediocre golf and being comfortably bored.”
― Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald

“Literature was a form of intoxication, and many nights he read and wrote in his tower room till the cigarette butts littered the ash trays -- then wandered up to Nassau Street through the darkened campus for string potatoes and milk at Joe's.”
― Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald