Eugene Ionesco

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

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

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.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

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.

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.

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

You can only predict things after they have happened.

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

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