Quotes by

Antonin Artaud

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

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

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself. – Antonin Artaud

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows. – Antonin Artaud

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything – Antonin Artaud

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggars teeth. – Antonin Artaud

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. – Antonin Artaud

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. – Antonin Artaud

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes. – Antonin Artaud

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones. – Antonin Artaud

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us. – Antonin Artaud

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. – Antonin Artaud

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

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

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. – Antonin Artaud