“Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.”
The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: I let characters and symbols emerge from me, as if I were dreaming. I always use what remains of my dreams of the night before. Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can’t be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine. So I let words and images emerge from within. If you do that, you might prove something in the process.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Eugéne Ionesco59
Romanian playwright 1909–1994Related quotes
“History proves nothing because it contains everything.”
Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay
A Short History of Decay (1949)
“To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.”
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist
As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
Pensées Philosophiques (1746)
“I never tried to prove anything to someone else. I wanted to prove something to myself.”
Kobe Bryant (1978–2020) American basketball player
John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator
"Perfect Knowledge in Final Things" (p. 108)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)
“In principio it is impossible to prove from experiments that something is non-existent.”
Felix Ehrenhaft (1879–1952) Austrian physicist
The Magnetic Current http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1941Sci....94..232E, Science, Volume 94, Issue 2436, pp. 232-233 (September, 1941)