Eugene Ionesco

“You can only predict things after they've happened.”

“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.”

“Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission”

“Living is abnormal.”

“There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.”

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”

“Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysica...”

“I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores...”

“Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.”

“I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the s...”

“Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.”

“I look out the chair while eating my pillow. I open the wall, I walk with my ears. I have ten eyes to walk with and two fingers to look with. I put my head on the floor to sit down, I put my...”

“A civil servant doesn't make jokes.”

“Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationship...”

“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 characte...”

“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”

“My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and...”

“Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.”

“Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.”

“When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At...”