A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

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.

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.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

Living is abnormal.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

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

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.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

We have not the time to take our time.

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

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

All theatre is absurd.

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.

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

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.'

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.

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.

When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.

Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.

Boredom flourishes too when you feel safe. Its a symptom of security.

Describe a circle stroke its back and it turns vicious.

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

I don't think I could ever do a network sitcom because the humor is often based on some trite circumstance. I don't want to be a part of a show where it's mostly about coming up with the jokes.

When my mother died, I had to go on air that night and do jokes.

Musician jokes are a kind of joke that usually have to do with how much money someone makes. Musicians are always starving, so they're really mean to each other about who makes what.

Everyone for the most part is really nice. There have always been jokes, but that's part of being in the spotlight. You can't make everyone completely happy.

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

You achieve the surreal jokes through the realism by making it elastic.

I try to exist in a world where there is freedom of opinion, where you're allowed to make jokes. I don't want to live in some PC world where no-one's allowed to say anything.

It wasn't until I became more confident with myself and I put myself forward instead of the jokes; at first it was put the jokes out there and I'm just behind the jokes.

Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.

In polite society one laughs at all the jokes, including the ones one has heard before.

Well, there are conjoined twins in real life and we can tell a story about them so long as they're not the brunt of the jokes. In this, they're the heroes of this story; we love these guys.

Johnny Carson started the jokes about me and Marlin in his monologues.

We are living in the machine age. For the first time in history the comedian has been compelled to supply himself with jokes and comedy material to compete with the machine. Whether he knows it or not, the comedian is on a treadmill to oblivion.

Zac Efron is like a brother who's just goofy and crazy. He plays a lot of practical jokes.

I have 40 years of unpublished material, the ones they don't pick, and the reason I don't redraw them or use them again is that I like to use my brain every day and come up with new jokes.

I feel that after all those horrible reviews and jokes, I wasn't crazy all these years to stand up for the music I believe in. This album has proven that somewhere in the human race, the human heart is still racing and breaking and I am so grateful.

Everybody that's living in this earth is living in a situation. It's not narrow-minded to the point where everybody is serious and nobody has a personality. I think people die telling jokes.

My dog was with me all the time. I talked to my dog. She was my best buddy. I shared all my secrets with her, but I don't think I every really tried jokes out with the dog.