Eugène Ionesco Quotes

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.

Tous les chats sont mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat.

...există emoţii nepermise, precum, de pildă, viţelismul la poarta de aur fals a literaturii proaste. (...) Românul este, de altfel, leneş în viaţa de toate zilele, liric în poezie, tembel în politică şi impresionist în critica literară.

Dans la vie, il faut regarder par la fenêtre. (XI, 61)

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.

Sînt deja închis. Cum sînt toti. Închis si totodata prea liber.

Do rhinoceroses cough?

In spite of all these concerns, in the morning when I left my hotel I went joyfully down the stairs, whistling all the while, and emerged into the street at ten or eleven, whenever I wanted. It was fun, I felt happy, and then I realized that it wasn’t all much fun and I wasn’t all that happy. Had a weight been lifted from my back? The weight of living? I had been born bowed down with grief. The universe seemed to me a kind of enormous cage, or rather a big prison, with the sky a ceiling, and the horizon walls beyond which there had to be something else. But what? I was in a vast space, and yet it was locked. Or rather, I had the feeling I was in a huge ship, and the sky above was an enormous cover. There was a crowd of prisoners, and as far as I could tell most of them were unaware of their condition. What was there beyond the walls? Well, when you really thought about it, there was a positive side to the picture: the daily prison, the little jail inside the big one, had opened its doors to me. Now I was able to stroll at will along the main thoroughfares, the broad avenues of the big jail. It was a world comparable to a zoo in which the animals enjoyed a kind of semi-freedom, with man-made mountains, artificial woods, and imitation lakes, but at the far reaches there were still the same old fences.

Who has any interest in prolonging this confusion? I don't know. Let's not try to know. Let's leave things as they are. [

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

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!

Sa Majesté, la reine Marie, seconde épouse du Roi, première dans son coeur

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

People don't change, their situations change. My circumstances can improve or grow worse but it's always myself in the midst of them, unchanged in my private essence.