Eugene Ionesco Quotes

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

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

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

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

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.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

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

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

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying

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

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

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

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission

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

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.

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

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

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

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.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.

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

We have not the time to take our time.

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

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

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

We haven't the time to take out time.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

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

Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

I just can't get used to life.

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

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

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.

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

Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.

Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.