Eugene Ionesco Quotes

Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.

- Eugene Ionesco

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.

- Eugene Ionesco

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

- Eugene Ionesco

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

- Eugene Ionesco

I look out the chair while eating my pillow. I open the wall, I walk with my ears. I have ten eyes to walk with and two fingers to look with. I put my head on the floor to sit down, I put my bottom on the ceiling. After eating the music box, I spread jam on the rug for a great dessert.

- Eugene Ionesco

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

- Eugene Ionesco

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

- Eugene Ionesco

When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.

- Eugene Ionesco

My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.

- Eugene Ionesco

Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.

- Eugene Ionesco

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

- Eugene Ionesco

Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.

- Eugene Ionesco

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

- Eugene Ionesco

I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'

- Eugene Ionesco

Art goes beyond politics. Even if there are writers who are involved in politics, eventually, in one or two centuries, it's not their politics which is going to count, but the fact of having given life to feelings, of having created characters and made a living work of art.

- Eugene Ionesco

Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.

- Eugene Ionesco

The artist can be above political parties, he can belong in a political party, he can act in politics.

- Eugene Ionesco

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

- Eugene Ionesco

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

- Eugene Ionesco

Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.

- Eugene Ionesco

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

- Eugene Ionesco

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

- Eugene Ionesco

We have not the time to take our time.

- Eugene Ionesco

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

- Eugene Ionesco

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

- Eugene Ionesco

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

- Eugene Ionesco

All theatre is absurd.

- Eugene Ionesco

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

- Eugene Ionesco

Living is abnormal.

- Eugene Ionesco

You can only predict things after they have happened.

- Eugene Ionesco

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

- Eugene Ionesco