Eugene Ionesco (1909 – 1994)
Born Eugen Ionescu, was a French-Romanian playwright and dramatist, one of the foremost playwrights of Theatre of the Absurd.
It was quite fashionable to poke fun at Hugo. You remember Gide’s “Victor Hugo is the greatest French poet, alas!” or Cocteau’s “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” Anyway, I hated rhetoric and eloquence. I agreed with Verlaine, who said, “You have to get hold of eloquence and twist its neck off!” Nonetheless, it took some courage. Nowadays it is common to debunk great men, but it wasn’t then.
Over the past thirty years, Ionesco has been called a “tragic clown,” the “Shakespeare of the Absurd,” the “Enfant Terrible of the Avant-Garde,” and the “Inventor of the Metaphysical Farce” — epithets that point to his evolution from a young playwright at a tiny Left Bank theater to an esteemed member of the Académie Française.
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.
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.