F. Scott Fitzgerald

There are no second acts in American lives. ”

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. ”

Action is character. ”

There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired. ”

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. ”

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. ”

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

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood. ”

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material. ”

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ”