Eugène Ionesco Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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
None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us.

Eugène Ionesco
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.

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

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

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

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

Eugène Ionesco
Pray to the I don't-know-who
I hope: Jesus Christ.

Eugène Ionesco
It was quite fashionable to poke fun at Hugo. You remember Gide's Victor Hugo is the greatest French poet, alas! or Cocteau's Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo. Anyway, I hated rhetoric and eloquence. I agreed with Verlaine, who said, You have to get hold of eloquence and twist its neck off! Nonetheless, it took some courage. Nowadays it is common to debunk great men, but it wasn't then.

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
It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.

Eugène Ionesco