Eugene Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
Eugène Ionesco; 26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) was a Romanian-French playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 November 1909
CountryFrance
art believe culture
I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.
believe philosophical childhood
As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.
Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, eveything that will be has been.
emotional explain fall hunger initial jealousy marx necessity
Marx was wrong; jealousy and pride, emotional forces, are just as responsible as hunger and necessity for our actions; they explain the whole of History, and the initial fall of man.
ancient becomes breath hot idiom imagery language larger magic people saying unchanging
Idiom is larger than geography; it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars.
attempt claims dream history humbug reality simply stops truer
There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to ''realize'' myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have ''succeeded,'' this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is ''realizable.'' Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
behind hide men symptom
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their clichTs.
confusion function identify nowadays people society tempted today unpleasant
The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function; or rather, people are tempted to identify with the function they perform. This is what's happening, particularly in totalitarian soc
life-and-death forever born
Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
trying despair way
Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
ridiculous certain mankind
It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind,
illusions-of-grandeur people triviality
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
distance moving space
The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.
government servant jokes
A civil servant doesn't make jokes.