Eugene Ionesco
People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?Collection: People
Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Men
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.Collection: Inspirational
I am told, in a dream you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.Collection: Dream
DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.Collection: Reality
Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.Collection: Writing
In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History... 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.... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.Collection: Philosophy
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?Collection: Mean
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The SubmissionCollection: Names
A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.Collection: Memories
If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Dream
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.Collection: Dream
Oh righteous doom, that they who make Pleasure their only end, Ordering the whole life for its sake, Miss that whereto they tend. While they who bid stern duty lead, Content to follow, they, Of duty only taking heed, Find pleasure by the way.Collection: Missing
I just can't get used to life.Collection: Life
When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like a light that blots out everything, but a blinding light; nothing more can be made out.Collection: Philosophical
When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.Collection: Humorous
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.Collection: Travel
Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.Collection: Childhood
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.Collection: Distance
I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.Collection: Writing
I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.Collection: Art
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.Collection: Art
I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.Collection: Years
Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.Collection: Inspirational
We haven't the time to take out time.Collection: Time
Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.Collection: Circles
For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.Collection: Fall
As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.Collection: Philosophical
Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.Collection: Despair
I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.Collection: Hate
I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.Collection: Song
All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.Collection: Drama
I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.Collection: Dream
I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.Collection: Long
To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.Collection: Real
A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.Collection: Doctors
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.Collection: Death
The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.Collection: Childhood
You've always made the mistake of being yourself.Collection: Being Yourself
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.Collection: Drama
To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.Collection: World
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.Collection: Writing
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.Collection: Death
It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.Collection: Philosophical
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.Collection: Effort
The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.Collection: Art