Antonin Artaud Quotes

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

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.

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

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.