A Life in Letters Quotes

“To daughter Scotty Oct. 20, 1936 p. 313

Don't be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Let me preach again for a moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will by itself invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician or Marxism to the communist - or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“Remember in all society nine girls out of ten marry for money and nine men out of ten are fools.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters: A New Collection Edited and Annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli

“I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journaleese.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“ToScottie March 11, 1939 p. 387- 388

And please do not leave good books half- finished, you spoil them for yourself...Don't be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters: A New Collection Edited and Annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli

“I doubt if, after all, I’ll ever write anything again worth putting in print.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters: A New Collection Edited and Annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli

“You combed Third Avenue last year
For some small gift that was not too dear,
Like a candy cane or a worn out truss,
To give to a loving friend like us
You'd found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks
As the Edsel Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks
The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts
The Coleman T. and Pierre duponts
But not one gift to brighten our home
So I'm giving you back your Goddamn poem.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“Relationships have an unfortunate way of wearing out, like most things in this world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“You are not married to a millionaire of thirty but to a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn't a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and a sick body.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“To Scottie July 18, 1940 p.454

The prose talent depends on other factors- assimilation of material and careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developedway of saying it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“To Scottie June 12, 1940 p.451

...don't take the things in which you can get 'A', for you can learn them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you get...No Achilles' heel ever toughened by itself...what little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty- without this I am nothing'...”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“To Frances Turnbull Nov. 9, 1938 p. 368

I've read the story carefully and, Frances, I'm afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotionsto sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child's passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway's first stories "In Our Time" went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt ajd known. In "This Side of Paradise" I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“To Scottie July 1937
I honestly believed with no effort on my part [10 years earlier at 30 on his first trip to Hollywood] I was a sort of magician with words - an odd delusion on my part when I had worked so desperately hard to develop a hard, colorful prose style.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters

“Fitzgerald to Zelda's DR. Oct. 1932

"Why can't I sell my short stories?" she says.

"Because you're not putting yourself in them. Do you think the Post pays me for nothing?"

(She wants to make money but she wants to save her good stuff for books so her stories are simply casually observed, unfelt phenomena, while mine are sectiobs, debased, over- simplified, if you like, of my own soul. That is our bread and butter and her health and Scotty's education.) p. 221”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , A Life in Letters

“am merely mourning that so many good or lively books are dead so soon, or only imperfectly kept alive in the cheap and severe impermanency”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters: A New Collection Edited and Annotated by Matthew J. Bruccoli