Eugene Ionesco

Dramatist

32 Quotes

Art goes beyond politics. Even if there are writers who are involved in politics, eventually, in one or two centuries, it's not their politics which is going to count, but the fact of having given life to feelings, of having created characters and made a living work of art.

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

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

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

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

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.

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

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

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.

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.

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

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

We have not the time to take our time.

All theatre is absurd.

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

You can only predict things after they have happened.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

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

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