ionesco on writing...

andre coutin: you do not view yourself as an improtant writer, you do not believe you're creating a magnum opus, yet for you writing is a way of experiencing the wonder of being.

eugene ionesco: to write. to experience the unique sensation of covering a sheet of paper with black signs, words which speak of the wonder of existing and the ability to express it. this is no stylistic exercise, but a birth occurring between nothingness and "thing-ness". to write is to be acutely conscious that the world is simultaneously a hell and a miracle. i discovered this sensation when i was ten or twelve years old. a writer always tries to express the ineffable.

andre coutin: salvation by literature?

eugene ionesco: i said that literature was this superficial, incidental, mediocre thing. yet i continue writing. i write so as to contradict myself. i'm free to express insignificance. books remains as objects, save us from the horror of nothingness. the what's-the-good-of-it-all which today prevents me from living fully doesn't stop my hand from covering sheets of paper with my scribblings.

grand street, issue 65, 1998

a mathematics calculating nothing...

"but is it not already an insult to call it anything so narrow as a game? is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all people and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? where does it begin, where does it end?..."

stefan zweig, chess story 1942