I'M WITH FRANCIS SCOTT ON THIS ONE

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s didn't like to discuss the book he was working on. In a 1940 letter to his daughter Scottie, he said: 'I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.' I agree wholeheartedly with this; I can't abide it when people ask me about what I am working on. I just don't want to say.

Read more of Fitzgerald’s thoughts on writing here.

I am fizzing waiting for Baz Luhrmann's movie of The Great Gatsby. I can't wait. I've loved Fitzgerald's work since I was a kid and I am certainly not averse to a screenful of Leo DiCaprio.

I re-read The Great Gatsby last year to gear up for the film coming out. I was in Croatia while reading it so West Egg in the book is now tied in my mind with a hot, strawberry scented Zagreb. It is an exquisite novel; such a great story of obsession, delivered in sentence after gorgeous sentence:

'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy; they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.’ 

Oh, yeah! Bring it on!