Eugène Ionesco cytaty

strona 2

„O, słowa, jakie zbrodnie popełnia się w imię wasze.”

„Jedyne zło, jakie prasa może wyrządzić człowiekowi, to wydrukować wiadomość o jego śmierci.”

„Wszystko jest lekcją.”

“I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“We are all Victims of Duty.”

“Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!”

“I am not capitulating.”

“I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it … I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me.”

“There are now many invisible people on stage.”

“You can stay in society and be alone, as long as you can be detached from the world. This is why I don’t think I have ever gone for the easy option or done things that were expected of me.”

“We exist on several different planes, and when we said nothing had any reason we were referring to the psychological and social plane.”

“Logician: A cat has four paws.
Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws.
Logician: Then it's a cat.
Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat?
Logician: And the contrary is also true.”

“Remembrance of Things Past is too long and difficult, and what is interesting is the seventh volume, Time Regained. Otherwise, Proust’s work is concerned with irony, social criticism, worldliness, and the passage of time, which are not my preoccupations.”

“All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers…
Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about…
Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.”

“People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?”

“It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.”

“I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.”

“The purpose of the Collège was the demolition of culture, even of surrealism, which they considered too organized. But make no mistake, these people were graduates of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and highly cultured. Their method was based on puns and practical jokes—le canular. There is a great tradition of puns in Anglo-Saxon literature — Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland — but not in French. So they adopted it. They believed that the science of sciences is the pataphysique and its dogma, le canular.”

“Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.”

“My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.”

“The Pataphysique is not dead. It lives on in the minds of certain men, even if they are not aware of it. It has gone into “occultation,” as we say, and will come back again one day.”

“God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.”

“But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity.”

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