Eugène Ionesco Quotes

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?

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

Psihoză colectivă, domnule Dudard, psihoză colectivă! Ca şi religia, care-i opiumul popoarelor!

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.

Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren’t really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they’re neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they’re unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive.

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

Je préfère la vie à la mort, exister à ne pas exister, car je ne suis pas sûr d'être une fois que je n'existerai plus

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

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

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.

Truth has only two sides, but it's the third side that's best.

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.

What's chivalrous about saying you've seen a rhinoceros?

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me

Lumea are nevoie să te cuprindă, pentru totdeauna, într-o definiţie simplă, scurtă şi definitivă, asupra căreia niciodată să nu revină. Iar insul este obligat să se conformeze propriei sale definiţiuni. Uneori îi place. Alteori se sufocă.