{"quotes":[{"text":"I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?","author":"Bridie Clark","tags":["careers","dreams","editing","fitzgerald","hemingway","wolfe"],"id":9460,"author_id":"Bridie+Clark"},{"text":"Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["f","fitzgerald","one","people","quote","quotes","scott","writer","writers"],"id":20745,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"Genius' was a word loosely used by expatriot Americans in Paris and Rome, between the Versailles Peace treaty and the Depression, to cover all varieties of artistic, literary and musical experimentalism. A useful and readable history of the literary Thirties is Geniuses Together by Kay Boyle-Joyce, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot and the rest. They all became famous figures but too many of them developed defects of character-ambition, meanness, boastfulness, cowardice or inhumanity-that defrauded their early genius. Experimentalism is a quality alien to genius. It implies doubt, hope, uncertainty, the need for group reassurance; whereas genius works alone, in confidence of a foreknown result. Experiments are useful as a demonstration of how not to write, paint or compose if one's interest lies in durable rather than fashionable results; but since far more self-styled artists are interested in frissons á la mode rather than in truth, it is foolish to protest. Experimentalism means variation on the theme of other people's uncertainties.","author":"Robert Graves","tags":["eliot","experimentalism","fitzgerald","genius","hemingway","pound"],"id":28880,"author_id":"Robert+Graves"},{"text":"The mortality rate of literary friendships is high. Writers tend to be bad risks as friends ~ probably for much the same reasons that they are bad matrimonial risks. They expend the best parts of themselves in their work. Moreover, literary ambition has a way of turning into literary competition; if fame is the spur, envy may be a concomitant.","author":"Matthew J. Bruccoli","tags":["fitzgerald","friendship","hemingway","writers"],"id":31119,"author_id":"Matthew+J.+Bruccoli"},{"text":"He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["autumn","beauty","distance","fitzgerald","love","woman"],"id":58084,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"You've got an awfully kissable mouth.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["fitzgerald","flapper","humor","kiss","kissing","kissing","love","lust","relationships","romance"],"id":62333,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["beauty","death","fitzgerald","happiness","rose","roses","sadness"],"id":113879,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"My courage is faith--faith in the eternal resilience of me--that joy'll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I've got to keep my lips shut and my chin high and my eyes wide--not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I've been through hell without a whine quite often--and the female hell is deadlier than the male.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["courage","faith","fitzgerald","gatsby","inspirational","inspirationals","inspire","life","love","love-hurts","resilience","romance","smile","smilin"],"id":159993,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don't like this kiss-and-forget.''But I don't want to argue. I think it's wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can't it'll be time to argue.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["argue","argument","beautiful","damned","fitzgerald","forget","kiss","love"],"id":173943,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"},{"text":"I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.","author":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","tags":["america","american-dream","fitzgerald","jazz-age-stories","short-stories","women"],"id":176198,"author_id":"F.+Scott+Fitzgerald"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}