F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
is another favorite writer. I won't go into any details about his
life. That's not what I find interesting anyway. It's his writing
I admire, not his personality. His language is beautiful and I love
the settings for his novels. You see all those rich people in their
beautiful homes, yet they can't find happiness no matter how hard
they try. I think that was typical of the era. Post-WWI. The disillusioned
generation. On the other hand, later eras have tended to disillusion
their generations too.
Here are some quotes by or about
Fitzgerald:
"What people are ashamed of usually
makes a good story." - from the Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western,
section 15 (first part).
"Then the postman rang, and that
day I quit work and ran along the streets, stopping automobiles
to tell friends and acquaintances about it-- my novel This Side
of Paradise was accepted for publication. That week the postman
rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a
suit,and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness
and promise." -"Early Success," American Cavalcade (October 1937)
"A writer's days must be bound each
to each by his sense of his life, and Fitzgerald the undergraduate
was father of the best in the man and the novelist." "Fitzgerald
was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy,
descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism,
of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self." -Trilling,
Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1953.
235-44.
"All life is just a progression toward,
and then a recession from, one phrase -- I love you." -"The Off-Shore
Pirate," The Saturday Evening Post (29 May 1920)
" . . All fine prose is based on
the verbs carrying the sentences. A line like "The hare limped
trembling through the frozen grass," is so alive that you race through
it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with
its movement the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before
your eyes." - FSF to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 1938; qtd. in F.
Scott Fitzgerald On Writing, New York: Scribners, 1985, 53.
"Action is character." - The Notebooks
of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978. p. 332
"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."
- FSF to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 1940; qtd. in F. Scott Fitzgerald
On Writing, New York: Scribners, 1985, 56.
"All good writing is swimming under
water and holding your breath." -F. Scott Fitzgerald, from an undated
letter to his daughter Scottie.
"People read him now for clues and
guidelines, as if by understanding him and his beautiful and damned
period, they could see more clearly what's wrong." -Smith, Scottie
Fitzgerald. "Notes About My Now-Famous Father." Family Circle (May
1974): 118-20.
"My whole theory of writing I can
sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of
his own generation, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters
of ever afterward." An ambitious, twenty-three-year-old Fitzgerald
penned this "Author's Apology" for his first novel, This Side of
Paradise.
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