Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
The artist can be above political parties, he can belong in a political party, he can act in politics.
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie.
Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.
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.
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
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.
The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.
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 have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'
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.
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.
Art goes beyond politics. Even if there are writers who are involved in politics, eventually, in one or two centuries, it's not their politics which is going to count, but the fact of having given life to feelings, of having created characters and made a living work of art.
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.
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 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.
I look out the chair while eating my pillow. I open the wall, I walk with my ears. I have ten eyes to walk with and two fingers to look with. I put my head on the floor to sit down, I put my bottom on the ceiling. After eating the music box, I spread jam on the rug for a great dessert.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.