Quotes & Sayings About The Great Gatsby

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby — Azar Nafisi

You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil. — Azar Nafisi

I have a hard time finding something that I really enjoy reading, but I read 'The Great Gatsby' every summer. — Dree Hemingway

If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to. People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation. — Baz Luhrmann

If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business. — Robert Harris

If it wasn't for the mist we could see your home across the bay," said Gatsby. "You always have a green light that burns at the end of your dock."
Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to him, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted things had diminished by one. — F Scott Fitzgerald

When we studied the 1920s, he pretended that cell phones were illegal and made half the class narcs, and then he had us read The Great Gatsby. — Alison Umminger

'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart. — Frank Delaney

'The Great Gatsby' is a book I have read a few times, and it seems to get heavier every time I come to visit. — Henry Rollins

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is perfect in the same way that The Great Gatsby is perfect. Take a pencil and read these books, looking for something that doesn't sound right, something you'd want to change. You'll leave the page untouched. — William McKeen

In these fast and fickle times, it's nice to know that there are some things you can always count on: the enduring brilliance of the last page of The Great Gatsby; the near-religious harmonies of the Beach Boys' "California Girls"; and the lifelong friendship of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. — Sarah Vowell

The most enduring stories in literature generally have some kind of crime at their center, whether it's the bloody butchery of 'Hamlet,' the lecherous misanthropes of Dickens or the lone gunman from 'The Great Gatsby.' — Karin Slaughter

Daisy doesn't even go to his funeral, Nick and Jordan part ways, and Daisy ends up sticking with racist Tom ... you can tell Fitzgerald never took the time to look up at clouds during sunset, because there's no silver lining at the end of that book, let me tell you.
I do see why Nikki likes the novel, as it's written so well. But her liking it makes me worry now that Nikki really doesn't believe in silver linings, because she says The Great Gatsby is the greatest novel ever written by an American, and yet it ends so sadly. One thing's for sure, Nikki is going to be very proud of me when I tell her I finally read her favorite book. -Silver Linings Playbook, p. 9 — Matthew Quick

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all
Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I think the novel is a wonder....it has vitality to an extraordinary degree, and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality....And as for the sheer writing, it's astonishing. [About The Great Gatsby] — Maxwell Perkins

Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' believe it's a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren't altogether wrong. — Steve Erickson

Even before the letter he'd been divided: one part of him swanning with Jay Gatsby around an imaginary Gotham; the other part stolid and earthbound, nose to the deep fryer, in the stifling, sizzling South. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Personal identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly re-inventing herself in 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' to Jay Gatsby in 'The Great Gatsby.' It seems like the sort of archetypal American issue. If you're given the freedom to be anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it? — Chuck Palahniuk

I would love it if anyone gave me the job of adapting 'The Great Gatsby,' but nobody ever does. — Andrew Davies

I do see why Nikki likes the novel, as it's written so well, but her liking it makes me worry now that Nikki doesn't really believe in silver linings. Because she says The Great Gatsby is the greatest novel ever written by an American, and yet it ends so sadly. One thing's for sure. Nikki is going to be very proud of me when I tell her I finally read her favorite book. Here's another surprise: I'm going to read all the novels on her American Literature class syllabus, just to make her proud. To let her know that I am really interested in what she loves. — Matthew Quick

Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction
Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn ... No
Gatsby turned out all right in the end; it was what prayed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and the short-winded elations of men. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Reading it now for the seventh or eighth time, I am more convinced than ever not merely that The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald's masterwork but that it is the American masterwork, the finest work of fiction by any of this country's writers. — Jonathan Yardley

He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. — F Scott Fitzgerald

It's Fitzgerald's thin-but-durable urge to affirm that finally makes Gatsby worthy of being our Great American Novel. Its soaring conclusion tells us that, even though Gatsby dies and the small and corrupt survive, his longing was nonetheless magnificent. — Maureen Corrigan

But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable again. — F Scott Fitzgerald

This is a valley of ashes - a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the form of houses and chimneys and riding smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In my opinion, Fiction is a figment of our imagination & it causes us to dream but Reality taints dreams, and the F.scott Fitzgerald has clearly depicted this in The Great Gatsby. — Parul Wadhwa

I think that The Great Gatsby has had some influence on contemporary dressing. I'm seeing more boyish haircuts and drop-waist sheath dresses. — Ruth E. Carter

So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate road-house next door. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What gets me about D.B., though, he hated the war so much, and yet he got me to read this book A Farewell to Arms last summer. He said it was so terrific. That's what I can't understand. It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don't see how D.B. could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that. I mean, for instance, I don't see how he could like a phony like that and still like that one by Ring Lardner, or that other one he's so crazy about, The Great Gatsby. D.B. got sore when I said that, and said I was too young and all to appreciate it, but I don't think so. I told him I liked Ring Lardner and The Great Gatsby and all. I did, too. I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. Old Gatsby. Old sport. That killed me. — J.D. Salinger

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax. — F Scott Fitzgerald

What are you doing with all these books?" I asked, stepping towards a tall stack on the floor. I ran my fingers down the spines, recognizing a few familiar titles from School: Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, and To the Lighthouse.
Caleb came beside me, his warm shoulder brushing against mine. "I do this funny thing sometimes," she said, shooting me a mischievous grin. "I open a book, and I look at each page. It's called reading — Anna Carey

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men, and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s. — David Ignatius

I think everyone has some sort of connection to Gatsby as a character ... he's created himself according to his own emotions and dreams and lifted himself by his bootstraps from a poor kid in the Midwest and created this image that is The Great Gatsby and it's a truly American story in that regard. — Leonardo DiCaprio

I think 'Gatsby' is hobbled, in part, by its status as a Great American Novel. People kind of roll their eyes before they've even opened it, treat it with a 'been there, done that' attitude. I know I did. It took me years to re-open the novel and see how much I'd missed. — Susan Choi

He stayed there for a week , walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic. — Molly Guptill Manning

The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary.... You once told me you were not a natural writer - my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this. [about The Great Gatsby] — Maxwell Perkins

Everyone suspects themselves of at least one of the cardinal virtues ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough. — Ernest Hemingway,

Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life. — L.P. Hartley

The tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world. — Helen Gardner

She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand. — F Scott Fitzgerald

One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. — F Scott Fitzgerald

In my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself. — Donna Tartt

I am drawn to Tom Sawyer Island because a tribute to Mark Twain would not be out of place in a theme park of my own design. Should Vowell World ever get enough investors, I'm going to stick my Tom Sawyer Island in Love and Death in the American Novel Land right between the Jay Gatsby Swimming Pool and Tom Joad's Dust Bowl Lanes, a Depression-themed bowling alley renting artfully worn-out shoes. — Sarah Vowell

A sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Human sympathy has its limits. — F Scott Fitzgerald

One of my favourite books of all time: 'The Great Gatsby'. I just think it's so well written. — Danielle De Niese

Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and enormous, from the dissolving night. "God sees everything," repeated Wilson. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss. — Hugh Hefner

In the last month or so, i have read the great gatsby and a separate peace. i am starting to see a real trend in the kind of books bill gives me to read. and just like the tape of songs, it is amazing to hold each of them in the palm of my hand. they are all my favorites. all of them. — Stephen Chbosky

It was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. — John Irving

I may believe I'm not up to snuff, but Jill? Jill thinks I can date the Great Gatsby. — Liza Palmer

Who is he anyhow, an actor?"
"No."
"A dentist?"
" ... No, he's a gambler." Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919."
"Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people
with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
"How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.
"He just saw the opportunity."
"Why isn't he in jail?"
"They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I'd once again see that bob of blonde hair back on my pillow, that pink hot smile beaming toward me as I heroically win her heart in some kind of Count of Monte Cristo or Great Gatsby-esque gesture ... you know minus the long imprisonment or swimming pool death! — Tom Conrad

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.' — Pat Conroy

The artist, wrote Joseph Conrad, "speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives." That was the art that Scott Fitzgerald would find, reminding us that a mirage may be more marvelous in its way than an oasis in the desert. Gatsby's great error is his belief in the reality of the mirage; Fitzgerald's great gift was his belief in the mirage as a mirage. "Splendor," Fitzgerald came to understand, "was something in the heart. — Sarah Churchwell

Fitzgerald could sense that America was poised on the edge of a vast transformation, and wrote a novel bridging his moment and ours. The Great Gatsby made manifest precisely what Fitzgerald's contemporaries couldn't bear to see, and thus it is not only the Jazz Age novel par excellence, but also the harbinger of its decline and fall. — Sarah Churchwell

Empathy lies at the heart of Gatsby, like so many other great novels
the biggest sin is to be blind to others' problems and pains. Not seeing them means denying their existence. — Azar Nafisi

Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me. — Rob Sheffield

Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be. — Joyce Carol Oates

Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan scornful mouth smiled and I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face. — F Scott Fitzgerald

There are two of my favorite books, 'The Great Gatsby' and 'Gone With The Wind', that were made into movies. And I love those movies as much as I love the books. That's really rare. — Tatiana De Rosnay

My dark secret is I've always wished I was Gatsby. As heartbroken as he was and as horrible a fate as he endured, I admired that he loved. It's a difficult thing to do. — Sarah Noffke

My own rule is to let everything alone. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove — F Scott Fitzgerald

The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colours, and hair bobbed in strange new ways ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

But I know now that isn't true; history is filled with fictional people. And even the epigraph Fitzgerald placed at the beginning of The Great Gatsby is by a writer who doesn't exist. We have all been fooled into believing in people who are entirely imaginary - made-up prisoners in a hypothetical panopticon. But the point isn't whether or not you believe in imaginary people; it's whether or not you want to. — Robyn Schneider

You can't not like 'The Great Gatsby.' It's got the best sentences in, like, ever. — John Green

Something in his leisurely move- ments and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to deter- mine what share was his of our local heavens. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I — Pierce Brown

I picked up my college copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything. — Gail Collins

I read 'The Great Gatsby' in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love. — Tom Perrotta

The Great Gatsby' [ ... ] was my 'Tom Sawyer' when I was twelve [ ... ] — J.D. Salinger

One emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I was alone again in the unquiet darkness. — F Scott Fitzgerald

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared. — Michael Cunningham

He broke off and began to walk u and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Just handling this ocean of different books - new and used, in and out of print, famous and forgotten - it was literature as this giant mosaic of texts and experiments and attitudes. I think it's just very liberating to break out of a great man's theory of history.
I guess I've always liked working from that sense of - what would you call it? - license that the margins permit. I always just visualize myself writing books that were meant one day to be dusty, forgotten volumes being encountered by intrepid browsers in a used bookstore. It was a much less freighted way to think about trying to enter the conversation than to imagine I had to write The Great Gatsby. — Jonathan Lethem

They needed someone to write a script of The Great Gatsby very quickly for the movie they were making. I took this job so I'd be sure to have some dough to support my family. — Francis Ford Coppola

Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time. - The Great Gatsby. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day. — Bryan Ferry

I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s. — Garrett Hedlund

It's pathetic, but I don't really remember my first time reading 'The Great Gatsby.' I must have read it in high school. I'm pretty sure I remember it being assigned, and I generally did the reading. But I don't remember having a reaction to the book, even though I loved literature, and other works made a lasting impression on me at that age. — Susan Choi

Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge, anything at all ... — F Scott Fitzgerald

I love to read. I was in AP English in high school, and we were assigned books every few months. 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' are two of my favorite ones. — Spencer Boldman

There's green eyes in my eyes
And a lover on my mind
And I sing from the piano
Tear my yellow dress and
Cry and cry and cry
Over the love of you — Florence Welch

'The Great Gatsby' ticked so many boxes for me. — Joel Edgerton

It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy or Gatsby anymore, but of this clean, hard, limited person, who dealt in universal skepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer. — Azar Nafisi

I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years. — A. Scott Berg

Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. — F Scott Fitzgerald

He's just a man names Gatsby. — F Scott Fitzgerald

A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up towards the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Here are more lines from The Great Gatsby. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove.

I like to remember when I was one of them, or to pretend that I am one of them still, sensing that restless man at my back and half turning, no, turning all the way, open-armed, saying, Pick me, pick me. — Sigrid Nunez