Our Favourite Quotes For F. Scott Fitzgerald's Birthday.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald) was born 24th September 1896. Author of a number of great works, The Great Gatsby being the most successful. Fitzgerald lived a relatively normal life up until his writing debut - academic troubles meant that he never graduated college and so he found himself enlisting in the army instead where he was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama. It was here that he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre. Zelda agreed to marry Fitzgerald on the condition that he proved himself to be a success, and so his first novel This Side of Paradise was written.
The Great Gatsby followed five years later and its success brought fame, money and decadence along with it - a lifestyle that could only be maintained for so long. The Roaring Twenties was over and in its place came the Great Depression of the 1930s. Fitzgerald found himself battling alcoholism which inevitably affected his writing. He died of a heart attack aged 44 whilst working on what would be his final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon.
To celebrate Fitzgerald’s birth, life and writing, we thought we’d share a few of our favourite quotes from his works. We’d love to hear what yours are too!
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"Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness."
"In any case you musn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat."
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
"He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life.. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believe in you as you would like to believe in yourself."
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