black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Drive Experience Kind Liberty Potential Reality Revolution Shake
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Born Earth Food Myself People Preference
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

Artistic Flame Hell Ourselves Time Victim
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 fixation of the theater in one language–written words, music, lights, noises–betokens its imminent ruin.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Language Noise Ruin Theatre Writing
All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Mindset People Poet Quality Word Writing
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
If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Force Form Imagination Life Magic Observation Ourselves
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Death Poet Poetry Reading Worth Writing
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Actor Athlete Heart One Liner
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

Design Direction Introduction Myself Nature Reality Suicide Tendency
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

Encouragement Function Hard Ourselves Sleep Wake Up
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Character Sex Theatre
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.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Art Ideas Mistake Ourselves Poetry Power
Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
ANTONIN ARTAUD

Difference Feeling Rich Sensuality Spiritual
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

Asylum Defend Divine Intellectual Society Trouble

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Antonin Artaud Quotes