I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUDI cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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 -
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
I myself am an absolute abyss.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Life consists of burning up questions.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
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 -
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
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 -
The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Those who live, live off the dead.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
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 -
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.
ANTONIN ARTAUD -
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
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 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 ARTAUD