I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.
Do you read them? Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald?Only if I have to. I try to avoid old dead white men.
Fitzgerald has charm. It's a silly word, but it's an exact word for me. I like 'The Great Gatsby' and it's sad, gay nostalgia.
Writers aren't exactly people.... They're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person.
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
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 them...
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
Understand now, I'm purely a fiction writer and do not profess to be an earnest student of political science, but I believe strongly that such a law as one prohibiting liquor is foolish.
As Henry Dan Piper, one of Fitzgerald's most perceptive critics, has commented, his fiction heroes are destroyed because they attempt to fulfill themselves through their social relationships. They can...
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let o...