SOURCE: “Why Do I Write? A Summing Up,” in The Two Faces of Ionesco, The Whitson Publishing Company, 1978, pp. 5-19.

In the following essay, Ionesco sums up his reasons for writing, which include trying to recapture the paradisiacal light of his childhood and reveal it to others; communicating what he considers to be the dazzling miracle of existence, complete with its joys and horrors; and affirming through the creative act his presence in the universe.

I am still asking myself this question. I’ve been writing for a long time. When I was thirteen, I wrote my first play, at about eleven or twelve I was writing poems, and I was all of eleven when I started my memoirs: two pages of a school notebook. It isn’t as though there was a lack of things to say. I know that at that time I still had a...