When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That's why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.

Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.

EUGENE IONESCO, Notes and Counter Notes

I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!

A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Beauty is a precarious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well. Often it seems to me to be an evil flower of nothingness, or else the cry of the world as it dies, or a desperate, sumptuous prayer.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.

The superior man is the man who fulfils his duty.

I just can't get used to life.

Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.

The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.

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.

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

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.

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

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.

I hope for the final victory of the forces of good.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

Beckett destroys language with silence. I do it with too much language, with characters talking at random, and by inventing words.

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

There are now many invisible people on stage.

As a great critique asked me why I was not serious, I replied that the literature itself was not serious and that I was too serious for taking it too seriously.

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

There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you.

I can easily picture the worst, because the worst can easily happen.

It is a slice of life, a realistic play. If it can be criticised for being commonplace, it can certainly not be condemned for being untrue to life. So you will see mushrooms sprouting on the stage, which is incontrovertible proof not only that these mushrooms are real mushrooms, but that they are normal mushrooms too.

EUGENE IONESCO, Notes and Counter Notes

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.

EUGENE IONESCO, Present Past / Past Present