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“People always try to find base motives behind every good action.”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

“They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I found ancestors, like Shakespeare, who said, in Macbeth, that the world is full of sound and fury, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Macbeth is a victim of fate. So is Oedipus. But what happens to them is not absurd in the eyes of destiny, because destiny, or fate, has its own norms, its own morality, its own laws, which cannot be flouted with impunity. Oedipus sleeps with his Mummy, kills his Daddy, and breaks the laws of fate. He must pay for it by suffering. It is tragic and absurd, but at the same time it’s reassuring and comforting, since the idea is that if we don’t break destiny’s laws, we should be all right. Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don’t know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it’s ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

“Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.)”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: Beckett shows death; his people are in dustbins or waiting for God. (Beckett will be cross with me for mentioning God, but never mind.) Similarly, in my play The New Tenant, there is no speech, or rather, the speeches are given to the Janitor. The Tenant just suffocates beneath proliferating furniture and objects — which is a symbol of death. There were no longer words being spoken, but images being visualized. We achieved it above all by the dislocation of language. … Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

“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.”

Eugéne Ionesco

As quoted in The Writer's Quotation Book : A Literary Companion (1980) by James Charlton, p. 44

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

Eugéne Ionesco

Source: Man With Bags

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”

Eugéne Ionesco

As quoted in Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990) by Sy Safransky

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

Eugéne Ionesco

Découvertes (1970), as quoted in Choosing the Future : The Power of Strategic Thinking (1997) by Stuart Wells, p. 15

“I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.”

Eugéne Ionesco

“I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.”

Eugéne Ionesco

Source: Man With Bags

“People who don't read are brutes.”

Eugéne Ionesco

“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. I was not Jewish, but I pronounced my r’s as the French do and was often taken for a Jew, for which I was ruthlessly bullied.… It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi — writers, teachers, biologists, historians … It was a plague! They despised France and England because they were yiddified and racially impure.”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)

“I have always regretted having gotten involved with literature up to my neck. I would have preferred to have been a monk; but, as I said, I was torn between wanting fame and wishing to renounce the world. The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature? Either way, my writing, the only thing I have ever succeeded in doing, is invalidated.”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)

“It was quite fashionable to poke fun at Hugo. You remember Gide’s “Victor Hugo is the greatest French poet, alas!” or Cocteau’s “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” Anyway, I hated rhetoric and eloquence. I agreed with Verlaine, who said, “You have to get hold of eloquence and twist its neck off!” Nonetheless, it took some courage. Nowadays it is common to debunk great men, but it wasn’t then.”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)

“None of us would have written as we do without surrealism and dadaism. By liberating the language, those movements paved the way for us.”

Eugéne Ionesco

The Paris Review interview (1984)

“Pray to the I don't-know-who
I hope : Jesus Christ.”

Eugéne Ionesco

Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui
J'espère : Jesus-Christ.
Inscription on his tombstone.
Variant translation: Pray to the I don't-know-who: Jesus Christ, I hope.
As quoted in Parasuicidality and Paradox : Breaking Through the Medical Model (2007) by Ross D. Ellenhorn, p. 55

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

Eugéne Ionesco

As quoted in Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998) edited by Suzanne Michele Bourgoin, Paula Kay Byers, Gale Research Inc, p. 132

“We are all Victims of Duty.”

Eugéne Ionesco

Victimes du Devoir [Victims of Duty] (1953)