“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.”

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

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

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

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

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.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

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

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.

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

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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