166 Quotes by Eugene Ionesco

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.

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.

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.

Det er ikke sikkert at alkohol dreper alle sykdomsbasiller. Når det gjelder neshorneri, vet man ikke noe foreløbig.

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

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

Når det kommer til stykket, er jeg ikke sikker på om De har moralsk rett til å blande dem i saken. Dessuten tror jeg fremdeles ikke det er noen fare på ferde. Etter min mening er det absurd å gå fra konseptene fordi om noen mennesker har fått lyst til å skifte ham. Det får bli deres egen sak. Det står enhver fritt for.

C'est pour cela que les jeunes se suicident ou qu'on les tue. Ainsi on les cloue dans leur jeunesse pour toujours, dans les panoplies de l'éternité.

Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren’t really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they’re neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dismally neutral, who long without longings as though they’re unconscious, unconsciously suffering from being alive.