Ten Insights From The Writer Of THE GREAT GATBSY

Love shapes almost everything we do: "All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase - I love you." When we are not busy experiencing love, we are busy missing it, seeking it, or dissecting it.

When we are lost, we can get our bearings again by paying attention to our emotions: "Once I had had a heart but that was about all I was sure of. This was at least a starting place out of the morass in which I floundered: 'I felt—therefore I was.'"

Fitzgerald describes depression: "In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream— one is continually startled out of this."

People fear moving on even when its important because people fear irreversible moves: "A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist."

Fitzgerald describes his love for Zelda in a letter to a friend: "I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect. You’re still a Catholic, but Zelda’s the only God I have left now."

Fitzgerald's advice to writers: put your strongest emotional and intellectual concerns in the work. He said: "You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner."

To his daughter, Fitzgerald advised detachment from the "material world" so that she could "examine the validity of philosophic concepts" for herself and develop what he liked to call the "wise and tragic sense of life."

Unless one thinks for oneself, or one becomes a subject to someone or something else. Fitzgerald: "Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you."

Let's be alert to the brief moments when people are extremely receptive. Fitzgerald: "It isn't given for us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world."

Fitzgerald on how to create characters: "Start out with an individual and you find that you have created a type — start out with a type and you find that you have created nothing." Starting with a stereotype will get you nowhere. Better to start with idiosyncrasies instead.