Eugene Ionesco Quotes

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

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.

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?

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.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

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

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

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.

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls…but where is it?