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Wikipedia Summary for Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco (French: [øʒɛn jɔnɛsko]; born Eugen Ionescu, Romanian: [e.uˈdʒen joˈnesku] (listen); 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and was one of the foremost figures of the French avant-garde theatre in the 20th century. Ionesco instigated a revolution in ideas and techniques of drama, beginning with his "anti play", The Bald Soprano. Ionesco contributed to the beginnings of what is known as the Theatre of the Absurd, which includes a number of plays that, following the ideas of the philosopher Albert Camus, explore concepts of absurdism. He was made a member of the Académie française in 1970, and was awarded the 1970 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 1973 Jerusalem Prize.
The true nature of things, truth itself, can be revealed to us only through fantasy, which is more realistic than all the realisms.
A civil servant doesn't make jokes.
Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
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.
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.
Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
All theatre is absurd.
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.
There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
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.
I can easily picture the worst, because the worst can easily happen.
We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.
Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
Why was I born if it wasn't forever?
The superior man is the man who fulfils his duty.
If I denounce the absurd, I transcend the absurd by the very fact of my denunciation. For by what right should I declare a thing to be absurd, unless I had before me the image -- whether sharply or vaguely defined, no matter -- of something that was not absurd?
But what is absurd, or rather what is unusual, is first and foremost what exists, reality.
Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.
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.
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.
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.
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
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?
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.
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?
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.
God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
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.
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
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.
If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.
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.
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission.
The artist can be above political parties, he can belong in a political party, he can act in politics.
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.
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.
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.
Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.
You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
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.
A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.
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.
Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.
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.'
I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores -- its anti-Semitism for example.
A civil servant doesn't make jokes.
Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
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 man with a soul is not like every other man.
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
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.
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
You can only predict things after they have happened.
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.
Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.
We have not the time to take our time.
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
I've always been suspicious of collective truths.