Conversations with Professor Y Quotes

“   "Fine! Fine! I'm listening...but it's not very interesting!...
   "Oh, that's what you think! that's what you think! but nothing is very interesting, dear Professor Y! jot this down! take some notes!"
   "What notes?"
   "Just write!...that if it weren't for wars, alcohol, blood pressure and cancer, the people in our atheistic Europe would soon be bored to death of life!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“I have no ideas, myself! Not a one! there's nothing more vulgar, more common, more disgusting than ideas! libraries are loaded with them! and every sidewalk cafe!...the impotent are bloated with ideas!...they dazzle youth with ideas! they play the pimp!...and youth is ever ready, as you know, Professor, to gobble up anything, to go OOH! and AAH! by the numbers! How those pimps have an easy job of it! the passionate years of youth are spent getting a hard on and gargling ideeaas!...philosophies, if you prefer!...yes sir, philosophies! youth loves sham just as young dogs love those sticks, like bones, that we throw and they run after! they race forward, yipping away, wasting their time, that's the main thing!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“I was in full digression! far from the subject!...my colonel was losing track...rapidly, of my story! my story!...my own story!...the gifts that I had personally received from Heaven!...yet I had insisted, every time! truly extraordinary gifts!...I'd made him repeat them a hundred times!...enough so he'd remember! that I was the only true genius! the century's only writer! the proof: that no one ever spoke of me!...everyone was jealous! Nobel! no Nobel! they had all joined forces to have me executed!...they could just go fuck off!...drop dead! since it was a question of death between me and them! I'll send their readers packing! all their readers! I'll make the public grow sick of their books! cabal! no cabal! since there was no room for two styles!...it was mine or theirs!...crawl or breastroke!...you understand!...the only inventor of the century! is me! me! me right here! the only genius, you might say! damned or not!...”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“A little inventor, that's it!...of a little gimmick!...just a little gimmick that's all!...I don't fling out messages to the world!...not me, no sir! I don't clutter up the air with my thoughts! not me! I don't get high on words, nor on port, nor on the flattery of youth!...I don't cogitate for the universe. I'm just a little inventor, of a two-bit gimmick at that! and that won't last long! like everything else! like the swivel-stem collar button! I'm aware of my paltry importance! anything rather than ideas!...I leave ideas to the flea merchants! all ideas! to the hucksters, the pimps, the confusion mongers!...”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“Here's the truth, simply stated...bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don't believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000!...even 400 copies! just for the suckers! Alack!...Alas!...only love and romance...and even then!...manage to keep selling...and a few murder mysteries...”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y

“   "Okay!...my three dots! have people ever reproached me for them! they've slobbered on about my three dots!...'Ah! his three dots!...Ah, his three dots!...He can't finish his sentences!' Every stupidity in the book! every one, Colonel!"
   "So?"
   "Go!pss!pss!...piss off, Colonel! and what's your opinion, Colonel?"
   "Instead of those three dots, you might just as well put in a few words, that's what I feel!"   ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Conversations with Professor Y