Eugène Ionesco Quotes

Am avut întodeauna o proastă cenestezie:nu îmi e bine în pielea mea.De unde și nevoia de euforizante sau de băutură...
Să te lași în voia vieții.Să te lași purtat,să te lași ca pluta pe apele duratei,să te lași în voia vieții și astfel,poate,să ajungi în stare a te lăsa să mori.Minima rezistență.

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.

Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately. It's

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.

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

...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.

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.

Prenez un cercle, caressez-le, il deviendra vicieux.

Béranger represents the modern man. He is a victim of totalitarianism — of both kinds of totalitarianism, of the Right and of the Left. When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, “Ionesco shows us how we became Nazis.” But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it was an attack on Perónism.

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

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers I'd be a politician.

Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people.

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

Dieu est mort, Marx est mort et moi-même je ne me sens pas très bien

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. -->