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Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale."
“I should be able to get the alligators to dance to the tune of the pan pipe.”
“Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.”
“You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.”
“I believed in her body, I didn't believe in her soul. I thought of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life.”
“Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.”
“Beating up Jews (by Jew I mean anyone with a Jew for a grandparent, even one!) won’t help, I’m sure, that’s just going around in circles, it’s a joke, you’re only beating around the bush if you don’t grab them by the strings [tefillins], if you don’t strangle them with them.”
Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
Not who you're looking for? Others named Louis-Ferdinand Céline: 2016 film by Emmanuel Bourdieu