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
It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.

Eugène Ionesco
I have never been to the Right, nor have I been a Communist, because I have experienced, personally, both forms of totalitarianism. It is those who have never lived under tyranny who call me petit bourgeois.

Eugène Ionesco
An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression.

Eugène Ionesco
I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me.

Eugène Ionesco
I am told, in a dream... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.

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
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
I remember one day there was a military parade. A lieutenant was marching in front of the palace guards. I can still see him carrying the flag. I was standing beside a peasant with a big fur hat who was watching the parade, absolutely wide-eyed. Suddenly the lieutenant broke rank, rushed toward us, and slapped the peasant, saying, Take off your hat when you see the flag! I was horrified. My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible. The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?

Eugène Ionesco
Boredom! I've got used to that. You get used to it, or rather, you don't get used to it, but you get used to not getting used to it.

Eugène Ionesco
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all... Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

Eugène Ionesco
DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.

Eugène Ionesco
We exist on several different planes, and when we said nothing had any reason we were referring to the psychological and social plane.

Eugène Ionesco
To introduce people to a different world, to encounter the miracle of being, that is important. When I write The train arrives at the station, it is banal, but at the same time sensational, because it is invented.

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

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

Eugène Ionesco
All history is nothing but a succession of 'crises' – of rupture, repudiation and resistance... When there is no 'crisis', there is stagnation, petrification and death.

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

Eugène Ionesco
Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

Eugène Ionesco
You can stay in society and be alone, as long as you can be detached from the world. This is why I don't think I have ever gone for the easy option or done things that were expected of me.

Eugène Ionesco
The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into occultation, as we say, and will come back again one day.

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

Eugène Ionesco
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

Eugène Ionesco
PROFESSOR: You know how to count? How far can you count up to?
PUPIL: I can count to... to infinity.
PROFESSOR: That's not possible, miss.
PUPIL: Well then, let's say to sixteen.
PROFESSOR: That is enough. One must know one's limits.

Eugène Ionesco
I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me.

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

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