“The quotation means whatever you want it to mean. It was never part of a novel or story; instead, Fitzgerald wrote it in a notebook devoted to scraps and stray thoughts. The sentence has no context and appears by itself, separated from the previous and subsequent items (which are unrelated) with a horizontal line. So any guess as to what Fitzgerald meant is just that–a guess.

“For what it’s worth, Fitzgerald wrote these notebooks when he was working on The Last Tycoon, which was unfinished at his death. Elsewhere in his notes, he planned the structure of that novel as a Shakespearean-style five-act play. So any suggestion that Fitzgerald had a three-act play in mind when he made his cryptic remark must be viewed with suspicion.

“My point of view is that whatever follows the first act is, by definition, the second act. So if there’s no second act, that means the first act is all there is. But as I said, the sentence exists in isolation in Fitzgerald’s notebook, so you can read into anything you want.”

My comment: Thanks. Given the uncertainty about what Fitzgerald meant, maybe people should hold off declaring him to have been dead wrong–which is the usual context in which the quote is brought up.