"Ionesco believes that the irrational is man's intuitive form of vision. Everything that claims to be rational and realistic is a distortion of that vision, a shield raised against the absurdity of existence."

"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."

"There are now many invisible people on stage."

"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."

"We are all Victims of Duty."

"I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all."

"Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!"

"I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding. If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. 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."

"Every work of art (unless it is a pseudo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them."

"Logician: A cat has four paws. Old Gentleman: My dog had four paws. Logician: Then it's a cat. Old Gentleman: So my dog is a cat? Logician: And the contrary is also true."

"Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately."

"I am not capitulating."

"‘It was a lot of fuss about nothing, wasn’t it?’"

"I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have finished it ... I believe that aritistic creation is spontaneous. It is for me."

"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."

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

"But History was against me. History is right, objectively speaking. I'm just a historical dead end. I hope at least that my fate will serve as an example to you all and to posterity."

"I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me."

"It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think."

"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."

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

"It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind."

"Dieu est mort, Marx est mort et moi-même je ne me sens pas très bien"

"Prier le Je Ne Sais Qui J'espère : Jesus-Christ."

"Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been."

"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. I was not Jewish, but I pronounced my r’s as the French do and was often taken for a Jew, for which I was ruthlessly bullied.… It was the time of the rise of Nazism and everyone was becoming pro-Nazi — writers, teachers, biologists, historians … It was a plague! They despised France and England because they were yiddified and racially impure."

"I remember one day there was a military parade. A lieutenant was marching in front of the palace guards. I can still see him carrying the flag. I was standing beside a peasant with a big fur hat who was watching the parade, absolutely wide-eyed. Suddenly the lieutenant broke rank, rushed toward us, and slapped the peasant, saying, “Take off your hat when you see the flag!” I was horrified. My thoughts were not yet organized or coherent at that age, but I had feelings, a certain nascent humanism, and I found these things inadmissible. The worst thing of all, for an adolescent, was to be different from everyone else. Could I be right and the whole country wrong?"