Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUDThose who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUDWe must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
ANTONIN ARTAUDI 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 ARTAUDI am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
ANTONIN ARTAUDSo 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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.
ANTONIN ARTAUDIt 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 ARTAUDYou are quite unnecessary, young man!
ANTONIN ARTAUDThis is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
ANTONIN ARTAUDIn consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
ANTONIN ARTAUDCruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
ANTONIN ARTAUDI 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 ARTAUDTo break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
ANTONIN ARTAUDWritten poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
ANTONIN ARTAUDThe 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.
ANTONIN ARTAUDI am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD