Eugene Ionesco Quotes

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Eugene Ionesco

Profession : Dramatist

Birth : November 26, 1909

Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.

Eugene Ionesco

Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.

Eugene Ionesco

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

Eugene Ionesco

Beauty is a precious 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.

Eugene Ionesco

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

Eugene Ionesco

Living is abnormal.

Eugene Ionesco

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

Eugene Ionesco

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

Eugene Ionesco

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. 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.

Eugene Ionesco

Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.

Eugene Ionesco