All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
Interpretation
Good writing often requires effort and depth, akin to the challenge of swimming underwater.
F. Scott Fitzgerald uses this metaphor to convey that great writing involves deep immersion in thoughts and emotions, often requiring the writer to hold back simpler, surface-level expressions. Just as swimming underwater is a strenuous task that demands focus and stamina, so too does writing well require dedication, skill, and the ability to explore complex themes beneath the surface.
In practice
In a writing workshop, teachers may use this quote to inspire students to dig deeper in their narratives.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
...to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet self, to which the daily self (and others) are often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies.
When you're a performer, of course you want an audience, but it's very, very different from courting fame.
All the translations of a poem in all possible languages may add nuance to nuance and, by a kind of mutual retouching, by correcting one another, may give an increasingly faithful picture of the poem they translate, yet they will never give the inner meaning of the original.
A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.
If I'm inspired to make a certain kind of song, I'm going to make that kind of song, no matter if it's what they know me as or think I am.
There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
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