Eugène Ionesco

“Do rhinoceroses cough?”

— Eugène Ionesco

People who don't read are brutes.

— Eugene Ionesco

I just can't get used to life.

— Eugene Ionesco

All theatre is absurd.

— Eugene Ionesco

Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?

— Eugene Ionesco

I am not capitulating.

— Eugene Ionesco

We haven't the time to take out time.

— Eugene Ionesco

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

— Eugene Ionesco

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

— Eugene Ionesco

The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.

— Eugene Ionesco

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.

— Eugene Ionesco

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind,

— Eugene Ionesco

“Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately. It's”

— Eugène Ionesco

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

— Eugene Ionesco

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.

— Eugene Ionesco

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

— Eugene Ionesco

“But you'll never become a rhinoceros, really you won't ... you haven't got the vocation!”

— Eugène Ionesco

“It's not that I hate people. I'm just indifferent to them—or rather, they disgust me; and they'd better keep out of my…

— Eugène Ionesco

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

— Eugene Ionesco

“I don't believe in seeing evil in everything. I leave that to the inquisitors.”

— Eugène Ionesco

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

— Eugene Ionesco

“Now didn't I warn you, just a little while ago: arithmetic leads to philology, and philology leads to crime . . .”

— Eugène Ionesco

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think

— Eugene Ionesco

“FIRE CHIEF: Life is very simple, really. [To the Smiths:] Go on and kiss each other.”

— Eugène Ionesco

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and…

— Eugene Ionesco

Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new…

— Eugene Ionesco

“POMPIERUL: Hai să vă zic alta. Cocoşul. „într-o bună zi, un cocoş a vrut să facă pe câinele. Numai că n-a avut…

— Eugène Ionesco

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers...…

— Eugene Ionesco

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not…

— Eugene Ionesco

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that…

— Eugene Ionesco

The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function; or rather, people…

— Eugene Ionesco

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the…

— Eugene Ionesco

In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the…

— Eugene Ionesco

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a…

— Eugene Ionesco

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about,…

— Eugene Ionesco

When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I…

— Eugene Ionesco

“We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the…

— Eugène Ionesco

“I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature…

— Eugène Ionesco

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as…

— Eugene Ionesco

“I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which…

— Eugène Ionesco