Literary Birthday – 1 September – Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars was born 1 September 1887 and died 21 January 1961.
Quotes
- Writing is a noble privilege compared with the lot of most people, who live like parts of a machine, who live only to keep the gears of society pointlessly turning.
- Humanity lives in its fiction.
- I’m not an extraordinary worker, I’m an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.
- Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
- A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.
Blaise Cendrars (real name Frédéric Sauser) was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European modernist movement. The Paris Review says: ‘Cendrars lost his right arm in the First World War, while serving as a corporal in the Foreign Legion. He refused an artificial arm and prided himself thereafter on one-handed skill at shooting, fast driving, typing, brawling.’ During the 1920s he published two long novels, Moravagine (1926) and Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929). His last major work was published in 1957, entitled Trop, C’est Trop.
Source for quotes/Source for image: Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cendrars_1916.jpg
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