Eugène Ionesco Quotes

I feel so tired, so tired . . . worn out, heavy. I’ve got indigestion
and my tummy’s all blown out. I feel sleepy all the time.

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.

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

La pénicilline et la lutte contre l'alcoolisme sont bien plus efficaces que les changements de gouvernements.

We haven't the time to take our time.

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

People, they all have the word goodness on lips a bloody knife between their teeth.

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.

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

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.

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?

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don’t mean to imply that I’m any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn’t mean anything at all.

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.

Poezia este destinata poeziei si nu publicului. Poetul nu are nevoie de public. Publicul confunda poezia cu sansoneta.

And all I long for is the dawn!