“The 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.”

Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

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.

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

[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.

Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

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.

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

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.