F. Scott Fitzgerald - A Selection of Quotes (Due: Monday, March 23, 2009)

For this week's blog I've provided you with a small sampling of F. Scott Fitzgerald's private writings. Below are several quotes taken from letters he wrote to his daughter and to Ernest Hemingway, among others. In these, he comments on his life, his work, his observations on society and humanity. You might use one or more of these as a way to reflect on your reading the novel.

I'm going to resist providing you with a question or prompt for this week's blog assignment. Write about what you want to write about with regard to The Great Gatsby.
______________________________________

“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.”

–Letter, October 5, 1940, to his daughter, Frances

“Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.”

–Letter, April 27, 1940, to his daughter, Frances

“Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”

–Letter, Aug. 1936, to Ernest Hemingway

“A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.”

–Letter (undated) to his daughter, Frances

“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”

–Letter (undated) to his daughter, Frances

“Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.”

–Letter, July 7, 1938, to his daughter, Frances

“In a few days I’ll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod—always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults—rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.”

–Letter, September 22, 1919

“The purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood.”

–Letter, June 1, 1934, to Ernest Hemingway

“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.”

“Self-interview,” New York Tribune (May 7, 1920).

"That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton…I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works."

–F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters

Source: The Columbia World of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. www.bartleby.com/66/. [Accessed March 20, 2009].