Eugène Ionesco Quotes

...nu fiţi indulgenţi (indulgenta e o laşitate) şi să nu vă fie frică să mărturisiţi clar că tot ce se face în cultura noastră este nouăzeci şi nouă la sută rizibil şi unu la sută lizibil. Nu aveţi încredere nici în acest lizibil şi aveţi mai degrabă încredere în ilizibil. când vi s-o prezenta ceva ilizibil, adică ceva care trebuie nu să fie recunoscut, ci cunoscut pentru întâia dată, poate să găsiţi acolo ceva trainic.

I found ancestors, like Shakespeare, who said, in Macbeth, that the world is full of sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Macbeth is a victim of fate. So is Oedipus. But what happens to them is not absurd in the eyes of destiny, because destiny, or fate, has its own norms, its own morality, its own laws, which cannot be flouted with impunity. Oedipus sleeps with his Mummy, kills his Daddy, and breaks the laws of fate. He must pay for it by suffering. It is tragic and absurd, but at the same time it’s reassuring and comforting, since the idea is that if we don’t break destiny’s laws, we should be all right. Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to know?

We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.

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.

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.

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.

The French Revolution liberated people from the power of the aristocrats. But the bourgeoisie that took over represented the exploitation of man by man, and had to be destroyed — as in the Russian Revolution, which then degenerated into totalitarianism, Stalinism, and genocide. The more you make revolutions, the worse it gets. Man is driven by evil instincts that are often stronger than moral laws … there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free — which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust — the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack.

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.

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

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.

Now didn't I warn you, just a little while ago: arithmetic leads to philology, and philology leads to crime . . .

I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.

I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to have been a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world. The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature? Either way, my writing, the only thing I have ever succeeded in doing, is invalidated.-->

It’s a play about the life and martyrdom of a modern saint, who has just been canonized by the Church — or is it beatified? Which comes first? I’m not sure. Anyway, his name was Father Maximilian Kolbe, a Pole, and he died in Auschwitz. They were going to send some prisoners to a mine, where they would die of hunger and thirst. Father Kolbe offered to go instead of a man who had a wife and children and didn’t want to die. That man is still alive. … It won’t matter to me at all whether the Church canonizes him or not. The important thing is that such a man existed. -->