Eugène Ionesco Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

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

Eugène Ionesco
My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, Why? Why? So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.

Eugène Ionesco
Logician: A cat has four paws.
Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws.
Logician: Then it's a cat.
Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat?
Logician: And the contrary is also true.

Eugène Ionesco
All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers...
Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about...
Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.

Eugène Ionesco
The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. 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.

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

Eugène Ionesco
Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui
J'espère : Jesus-Christ.

Eugène Ionesco
God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.

Eugène Ionesco
Yoghurt is very good for the stomach, the lumber regions and apotheosis.

Eugène Ionesco
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their clichés.

Eugène Ionesco
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

Eugène Ionesco
People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?

Eugène Ionesco
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.

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

Eugène Ionesco
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

Eugène Ionesco
That's not it. That's not it at all. You always have a tendency to add. But one must be able to subtract too. It's not enough to integrate, you must also disintegrate. That's the way life is. That's philosophy. That's science. That's progress, civilization.

Eugène Ionesco
I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.

Eugène Ionesco
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. I was not Jewish, but I pronounced my r's as the French do and was often taken for a Jew, for which I was ruthlessly bullied.… It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi — writers, teachers, biologists, historians … It was a plague! They despised France and England because they were yiddified and racially impure.

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

Eugène Ionesco
But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity.

Eugène Ionesco
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.

Eugène Ionesco
You know, the Cathars believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world — which is why it doesn't work. I don't share this heresy. I'm too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn't talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn't understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, You rogue! You little rogue! and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God's game and laugh about it.

Eugène Ionesco
I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.

Eugène Ionesco
Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

Eugène Ionesco