Antonin Artaud > Quotes

“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

“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, The Theater and Its Double

“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

“For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.”
― Antonin Artaud

“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, Selected Writings

“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, The Theater and Its Double

“I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.”
― Antonin Artaud, Lettres à Génica Athanasiou

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I myself am an absolute abyss.”
― Antonin Artaud

“All writing is filth”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“Vivir no es otra cosa que arder en preguntas.”
― Antonin Artaud

“... not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker)...”
― Antonin Artaud, Watchfiends and Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period

“All writing is rubbish.
People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish.
The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today.
All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all those who are masters of language, all those for whom words have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and who have given names to these currents of thought—I am thinking of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their minds produce at every gust of wind—are rubbish mongers.
”
― Antonin Artaud

“There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel”
― Antonin Artaud, On Theatre

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

“A host of scorpions crawl out from under the wetnurse's dress and start swarming in her vagina which swells and splits, becomes transparent and shimmers like the sun”
― Antonin Artaud

“It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.”
― Antonin Artaud

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”
― Antonin Artaud

“VERBLUEFFENDE ENTDECKUNG. HIMMEL PHYSIKALISCH VERNICHTET. ERDE NUR EINE MINUTE VON SIRIUS ENTFERNT! KEIN FIRMAMENT MEHR.”
― Antonin Artaud

“Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.”
― Antonin Artaud