Eugene Ionesco Quotes
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Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.
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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
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In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means.
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Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
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I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?
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The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
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An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.
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People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?
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That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.
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Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
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A man with a soul is not like every other man.
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Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
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Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.
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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
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Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
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You can only predict things after they have happened.
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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
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A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.