Quotes from 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.

Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

You can only predict things after they've happened.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

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.

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

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.

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

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

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.

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.

Living is abnormal.

All theatre is absurd.

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

Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?

A civil servant doesn't make jokes

You can only predict things after they have happened.