Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I myself am an absolute abyss.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will … now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
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 -
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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