Antonin Artaud Quotes

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.

Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

Those who live, live off the dead.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

Life consists of burning up questions.

Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

I myself am an absolute abyss.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.

Actors are athletes of the heart.

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.

Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.