Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Who was Louis-Ferdinand Céline?

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Céline was the first name of his grandmother. He developed a new style of writing that modernized French literature.

Famous Quotes:

• Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.
• When you're not used to comfort and good things to eat, you're intoxicated by them in no time. Truth's only too pleased to leave you. Very little is ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you're not really very keen to keep hold of it.
• We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.
• To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
• This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don't sell anything to anybody.
• The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
• To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
• Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.
• There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible.
• With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.