EUGENE IONESCO

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

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

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

Living is abnormal.

We have not the time to take our time.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

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.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

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.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

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

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

The artist can be above political parties, he can belong in a political party, he can act in politics.

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 relationships to allow for the development of life in society.

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 twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.

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 same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'

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 characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.

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

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.