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When Silence Confronts Us, The Question To Which There Is No Answer Rings Out In The Silence. That Ultimate "why," That Great "why" Is Like A Light That Blots Out Everything, But A Blinding Light; Nothing More Can Be Made Out.

-Eugene Ionesco

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When Silence Confronts Us,

Eugene Ionesco

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When Silence Confronts Us, The Question To Which There Is No Answer Rings Out In The Silence. That Ultimate "why," That Great "why" Is Like A Light That Blots Out Everything, But A Blinding Light; Nothing More Can Be Made Out.

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We Haven't The Time To Take Out Time.

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Why Was I Born, If It Wasn't Forever?

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.

Like All Revolutions, The Surrealist Revolution Was A Reversion, A Restitution, An Expression Of Vital And Indispensable Spiritual Needs.

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.

Shakespeare Was The Great One Before Us. His Place Was Between God And Despair.

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.

Every Message Of Despair Is The Statement Of A Situation From Which Everybody Must Freely Try To Find A Way Out.

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.

Oh Righteous Doom, That They Who Make Pleasure Their Only End, Ordering The Whole Life For Its Sake, Miss That Whereto They Tend. While They Who Bid Stern Duty Lead, Content To Follow, They, Of Duty Only Taking Heed, Find Pleasure By The Way.

I Am Not Capitulating.

A Nose That Can See Is Worth Two That Sniff.

If One Does Not Understand The Usefulness Of The Useless And The Uselessness Of The Useful, One Cannot Understand Art.

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.

An Avant-garde Man Is Like An Enemy Inside A City He Is Bent On Destroying, Against Which He Rebels; For Like Any System Of Government, An Established Form Of Expression Is Also A Form Of Oppression. The Avant-garde Man Is The Opponent Of An Existing System.

Good Men Make Good Rhinoceroses, Unfortunately.

No Society Has Been Able To Abolish Human Sadness, No Political System Can Deliver Us From The Pain Of Living, From Our Fear Of Death, Our Thirst For The Absolute. It Is The Human Condition That Directs The Social Condition, Not Vice Versa.

Banality Is A Symptom Of Non-communication. Men Hide Behind Their Cliches.

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.

The Supreme Trick Of Mass Insanity Is That It Persuades You That The Only Abnormal Person Is The One Who Refuses To Join In The Madness Of Others, The One Who Tries Vainly To Resist. We Will Never Understand Totalitarianism If We Do Not Understand That People Rarely Have The Strength To Be Uncommon.

God Is Dead. Marx Is Dead. And I Don't Feel So Well Myself.

The Light Of Memory, Or Rather The Light That Memory Lends To Things, Is The Palest Light Of All. I Am Not Quite Sure Whether I Am Dreaming Or Remembering, Whether I Have Lived My Life Or Dreamed It. Just As Dreams Do, Memory Makes Me Profoundly Aware Of The Unreality, The Evanescence Of The World, A Fleeting Image In The Moving Water.

Everything That Has Been Will Be, Everything That Will Be Is, Everything That Will Be Has Been.

I Just Can't Get Used To Life.

I Have No Other Pictures Of The World Apart From Those Which Express Evanescence, And Callousness, Vanity And Anger, Emptiness, Orhideous Useless Hate. Everything Has Merely Confirmed What I Had Seen And Understood In My Childhood: Futile And Sordid Fits Of Rage, Cries Suddenly Blanketed By The Silence, Shadows Swallowed Up For Ever By The Night.

Nothing Makes Me More Pessimistic Than The Obligation Not To Be Pessimistic.

I Have Always Considered Imaginative Truth To Be More Profound, More Loaded With Significance, Than Every Day Reality... Everything We Dream About, And By That I Mean Everything We Desire, Is True (the Myth Of Icarus Came Before Aviation, And If Ader Or Bleriot Started Flying It Is Because All Men Have Dreamed Of Flight). There Is Nothing Truer Than Myth... Reality Does Not Have To Be: It Is Simply What Is.

Of Course, Not Everything Is Unsayable In Words, Only The Living Truth.

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.

Only The Ephemeral Is Of Lasting Value.

It's Only When I Say That Everything Is Incomprehensible That I Come As Close As Possible To Understanding The Only Thing It Is Given To Us To Understand.

Why Do People Always Expect Authors To Answer Questions? I Am An Author Because I Want To Ask Questions. If I Had Answers, I'd Be A Politician.

Theatre Is Simply What Cannot Be Expressed By Any Other Means; A Complexity Of Words, Movements, Gestures That Convey A Vision Of The World Inexpressible In Any Other Way.

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.

People Who Don't Read Are Brutes. It Is Better To Write Than To Make War, Isn't It?

Boredom Flourishes Too, When You Feel Safe. It's A Symptom Of Security.

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In The Name Of Religion, One Tortures, Persecutes, Builds Pyres. In The Guise Of Ideologies, One Massacres, Tortures And Kills. In The Name Of Justice One Punishes...in The Name Of Love Of One's Country Or Of One's Race Hates Other Countries, Despises Them, Massacres Them. In The Name Of Equality And Brotherhood There Is Suppression And Torture. There Is Nothing In Common Between The Means And The End, The Means Go Far Beyond The End...ideologies And Religion... Are The Alibis Of The Means.

For Me, It Is As Though At Every Moment The Actual World Had Completely Lost Its Actuality. As Though There Was Nothing There; Asthough There Were No Foundations For Anything Or As Though It Escaped Us. Only One Thing, However, Is Vividly Present: The Constant Tearing Of The Veil Of Appearances; The Constant Destruction Of Everything In Construction. Nothing Holds Together, Everything Falls Apart.

I Am Told, In A Dream You Can Only Get The Answer To All Your Questions Through A Dream. So In My Dream, I Fall Asleep, And I Dream, In My Dream, That I'm Having That Absolute, Revealing Dream.

We Have Not The Time To Take Our Time.

Many People Have Delusions Of Grandeur But You're Deluded By Triviality.

Illusions Of Grandeur

Delusions Of Grandeur

Oh Words, What Crimes Are Committed In Your Name? ~jack Or The Submission

To Tear Ourselves Away From The Everyday, From Habit, From Mental Laziness Which Hides From Us The Strangeness Of Reality, We Must Receive Something Like A Real Bludgeon Blow.

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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.

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.

Childhood Is Over The Moment Things Are No Longer Astonishing.

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You Can Only Predict Things After They Have Happened.

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The Critic Should Describe, And Not Prescribe.

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.

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.

It Isn't What People Think That Is Important, But The Reason They Think What They Think.

To Become Conscious Of What Is Horrifying And To Laugh At It Is To Become Master Of That Which Is Horrifying

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Ideologies Separate Us. Dreams And Anguish Bring Us Together.

Realism Falls Short Of Reality. It Shrinks It, Attenuates It, Falsifies It; It Does Not Take Into Account Our Basic Truths And Our Fundamental Obsessions: Love, Death, Astonishment. It Presents Man In A Reduced And Estranged Perspective. Truth Is In Our Dreams, In The Imagination.

A Work Of Art Is Above All An Adventure Of The Mind.

To Me The World Seems Grotesque, Absurd, Ridiculous, Painful.

Explanation Separates Us From Astonishment, Which Is The Only Gateway To The Incomprehensible.

I'll Never Waste My Dreams By Falling Asleep. Never Again.

Language Should Almost Break Up Or Explode In Its Fruitless Effort To Contain So Many Meanings.

Describe A Circle, Stroke Its Back And It Turns Vicious.

That's How We Stay Young These Days: Murder And Suicide.

A Man With A Soul Is Not Like Every Other Man.

A Civil Servant Doesn't Make Jokes.

Dreams Are Reality At Its Most Profound, And What You Invent Is Truth Because Invention, By Its Nature, Can't Be A Lie.

I Long For Solitude And Yet I Cannot Stand It.

The More I Try To Explain Myself, The Less I Understand Myself.

There Is No Religion In Which Everyday Life Is Not Considered A Prison; There Is No Philosophy Or Ideology That Does Not Think That We Live In Alienation.

I Still Forget, Sometimes, That I Am No Longer 12 Years Old.

A Writer Never Has A Vacation. For A Writer, Life Consists Of Either Writing Or Thinking About Writing.

People Always Try To Find Base Motives Behind Every Good Action. We Are Afraid Of Pure Goodness And Of Pure Evil.

Drama Lies In Extreme Exaggeration Of The Feelings, An Exaggeration That Dislocates Flat Everyday Reality.

We Are Made To Be Immortal, And Yet We Die. It's Horrible, It Can't Be Taken Seriously

You've Always Made The Mistake Of Being Yourself.

I Started Writing For The Theatre Because I Hated It.

It's Not A Certain Society That Seems Ridiculous To Me, It's Mankind.

Daisy: I Never Knew You Were Such A Realist-i Thought You Were More Poetic. Where's Your Imagination? There Are Many Sides To Reality. Choose The One That's Best For You. Escape Into The World Of Imagination.

The Human Comedy Does Not Attract Me Enough. I Am Not Entirely Of This World. I Am From Elsewhere, And It Is Worth Finding This Elsewhere Beyond The Walls...but Where Is It?

The Arts Are Man's Most Useless ... And Essential ... Activity.

Childhood Is The World Of Miracle And Wonder; As If Creation Rose, Bathed In The Light, Out Of The Darkness, Utterly New And Fresh And Astonishing. The End Of Childhood Is When Things Cease To Astonish Us.

It Is Not The Answer That Enlightens, But The Question.

I've Always Been Suspicious Of Collective Truths.

A Really Conscientious Doctor Ought To Die With His Patient. The Captain Goes Down With His Ship.

There Are More Dead People Than Living. And Their Numbers Are Increasing. The Living Are Getting Rarer.

Mediocrity Is More Dangerous In A Critic Than In A Writer.

I Am, It Seems, An Avant-garde Dramatist. It Would Even Seem Obvious Since I Am Present Here At Discussions On The Avant-garde Theatre. It Is All Entirely Official. But What Does The Term Avant-garde Mean?

All Cats Die. Socrates Is Dead. Therefore Socrates Is A Cat.

It's When I Am Fully Conscious That I Ask Questions.

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