Top 22 Great Gatsby Quotes

‘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.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster’s ‘Howards End’ and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby.’

I would love it if anyone gave me the job of adapting ‘The Great Gatsby,’ but nobody ever does.

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.’

Like the rest of the planet, I’m absolutely dying to see Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and am thrilled that Leonardo DiCaprio was cast in it – he’s perfect.

There might be children in Somalia or the Arctic who have never heard of ‘Hamlet’ or the ‘Great Gatsby.’ But you can bet they know ‘Tarzan.’

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.

One of my favourite books of all time: ‘The Great Gatsby’. I just think it’s so well written.

If you go back, ‘The Great Gatsby’ would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business.

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.

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.

I like to describe ‘Yellowstone’ is ‘The Great Gatsby’ on the largest ranch in Montana. Then it’s really a study of the changing of the West.

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?

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.

‘The Great Gatsby’ is a book I have read a few times, and it seems to get heavier every time I come to visit.

‘The Great Gatsby’ ticked so many boxes for me.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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. After World War Two, I expected something similar, a return to the period after the first war, but when the skirt lengths went down instead of up, I knew we were in big trouble.

Red carpets are awful. They’re like a kind of purgatory – you stand there, and there are cameras flashing everywhere. One of my first red carpets was in Cannes for ‘The Great Gatsby,’ and I’d never seen anything like it.