A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt.
ANTONIN ARTAUDLike 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.
More Antonin Artaud Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I myself am an absolute abyss.
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Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
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This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
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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.
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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.
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Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
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When I think about myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new space. I am on the moon as others are on their balconies. I participate in planetary gravitation in the fissures of my mind.
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We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.
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You are quite unnecessary, young man!
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Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
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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.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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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.
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In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
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Actors are athletes of the heart.
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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.
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Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
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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.
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