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

Antonin Artaud

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

Cruelty Decision Strict Theatre
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Creation Diagram Mindset Myself Soul
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Angel Human Live Need Pain Strength Swallow Understand
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Body Desperate Destroy Soul World Yourself
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Burning Call Flame Laughter Myself
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Act Affirmation Live Myself Reason Risk See Truth
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

Absence Feeling Myself Present Time Work
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

Genius Head Himself Life Preparation Shine Solution Understand
The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Believe Himself Life Man Mindset Place Poison Truth
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Human Literature Ourselves
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Cruelty Decision Determination Intention
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Destruction Force Image Poetry Relationahip Thrive
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Built Exception Hell Paint Writing
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

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

Conversation Hang Morning Myself
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Book Leadership Myself Open Reality Writing

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

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

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