Antonin Artaud quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Antonin Artaud on Wise Famous Quotes.

All writing is pigshit.

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

Those who live, live off the dead.

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

The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin.

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

All writing is filth

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

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

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

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.

I myself am an absolute abyss.

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

Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

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

It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.

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.

Actors are athletes of the heart.

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

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

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

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

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

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

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.

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

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

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

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

Life consists of burning up questions.

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

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

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.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

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

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

I have never written except to fix and perpetuate the memory of these cuts, these scissions, these ruptures, these abrupt and bottomless falls.

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

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.

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

The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.