Quotes from Eugene Ionesco

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

We have not the time to take our time.

We haven't the time to take out time.

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.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.

Tous les chats sont mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat.

Living is abnormal.

Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people.

We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

I'd rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox.

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths".

Take a perfect circle, caress it and you'll have a vicious circle.

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

We haven't the time to take our time.