Quotes from Louis-Ferdinand Celine

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.

There's no tyrant like a brain.

An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.

Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.

If you aren't rich you should always look useful.

That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.

The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.

Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.

When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.

so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers! ...

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.

The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.

I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.

An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.

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!