Matthew J. Bruccoli > Quotes

“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.”
― Matthew Joseph Bruccoli

“You can imagine Herman Melville coming to his publisher with his new manuscript. They ask him what it's about, and he says, 'It's about a one-legged captain who's had his leg bitten off by a whale.' It wouldn't have sounded that promising. Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby, he was told you couldn't write seriously about a bootlegger. If a man cares intensely enough about tiddley winks, his book about tiddley winks ill be a great novel.”
― Matthew J. Bruccoli

“They also provide abundant evidence that he was a painstaking reviser. Fitzgerald was concerned with sentence structure and word choice when he polished his prose; he left spelling to editorial hands. His punctuation”
― Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Summit Avenue—now regarded as the best-preserved Victorian residential boulevard in America—runs west from the Cathedral of St. Paul four and a half miles to the Mississippi River. The most impressive residence on the street was the mansion of railroad tycoon James J. Hill at No. 240, which provided an icon for the American success story. “Summit Avenue” designated the twelve-square-block neighborhood at the eastern end of Summit above downtown St. Paul.”
― Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“The women are realistic about love and marriage. His men – not his women – render allegiance to the notion of the world well lost for love”
― Matthew J. Bruccoli

“An ardent anti-Nazi, he was excited by the outbreak of World War II---which he had been predicting---and followed the war news closely. [On F. Scott Fitzgerald]”
― Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald