Quotes from Eugene Ionesco

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

Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.

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

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.

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

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

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

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.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren't really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they're neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they're unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive.

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.

Psihoz? colectiv?, domnule Dudard, psihoz? colectiv?! Ca ?i religia, care-i opiumul popoarelor!

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

Je préfère la vie à la mort, exister à ne pas exister, car je ne suis pas sûr d'être une fois que je n'existerai plus

A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don't know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it's ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

Truth has only two sides, but it's the third side that's best.

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.