Antonin Artaud Quotes & Sayings

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

The fixation of the theater in one language
written words, music, lights, noises
betokens its imminent ruin. — Antonin Artaud

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones. — Antonin Artaud

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius. — 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

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

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

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

The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice. — Antonin Artaud

You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief? ... We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone. — Antonin Artaud

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

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior. — Antonin Artaud

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. — Antonin Artaud

For the lost are lost by nature, all your ideas of moral regeneration will make no difference, there is AN INNATE DETERMINISM, there is an undeniable incurability in suicide, crime, idiocy, madness, there is an invincible cuckoldry in man, there is a congenital weakness of the character, a castration of the mind. — Antonin Artaud

Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh. — Antonin Artaud

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death. — Antonin Artaud

The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct. — Antonin Artaud

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 nastiness. — Antonin Artaud

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames. — Antonin Artaud

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. — Antonin Artaud

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves ... — Antonin Artaud

Those who live, live off the dead. — Antonin Artaud

Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is
hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want
to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards
culture. — Antonin Artaud

All writing is filth — Antonin Artaud

All writing is pigshit. — Antonin Artaud

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

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. — Antonin Artaud

I have never written except to fix and perpetuate the memory of these cuts, these scissions, these ruptures, these abrupt and bottomless falls. — Antonin Artaud

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape. — Antonin Artaud

Actors are athletes of the heart. — Antonin Artaud

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

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

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. — Antonin Artaud

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. — Antonin Artaud

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

It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation. — Antonin Artaud

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. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 + 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics. — Antonin Artaud

And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides. — Antonin Artaud

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

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. — Antonin Artaud

These terrifying forms which advance on me, I feel that the despair they bring is alive. It slips into this nucleus of life beyond which the paths of eternity extend. It is truly an eternal separation. They slip their knives into this center where I feel myself a man, they sever those vital ties which bind me to the dream of my lucid reality. — Antonin Artaud

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself — Antonin Artaud

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre. — Antonin Artaud

The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. — Antonin Artaud

I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born. — Antonin Artaud

Life consists of burning up questions. — Antonin Artaud

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. — Antonin Artaud

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes. — Antonin Artaud

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

[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis ... — Antonin Artaud

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. — Antonin Artaud

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom. — Antonin Artaud

[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. — Antonin Artaud

You are quite unnecessary, young man! — Antonin Artaud

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. — Antonin Artaud

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference. — Antonin Artaud

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

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection. — Antonin Artaud

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

I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life. — Antonin Artaud

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel — Antonin Artaud

And truly
must it be reduced to this stinking gas,
my body?
To say that I have a body
because I have a stinking gas
that forms
inside me?
(To have done with the judgement of God, 1947) — Antonin Artaud

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

The actor is an athlete of the heart. — Antonin Artaud

The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. [ ... ] If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness. — Antonin Artaud

There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely desperate. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity. — Antonin Artaud

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

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

Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them. — Antonin Artaud

We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms. — Antonin Artaud

And what is an authentic madman? It is 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. 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. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths. — Antonin Artaud

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human. — Antonin Artaud

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat. — Antonin Artaud

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life. — Antonin Artaud

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater. — Antonin Artaud

The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes; that is the
secret of fascination. And in his book, St Augustine does not doubt the
reality of this fascination for one moment. — Antonin Artaud

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness. — Antonin Artaud

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

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

... 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

Enough, I shall be understood in ten years by people who will be doing what you do today. Then my geysers will be known, my ice floes will be seen, the secret of adulterating my poisons will have been learned, the games of my soul will be revealed. — Antonin Artaud

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living. — Antonin Artaud

The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm. — Antonin Artaud

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

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

Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness. — Antonin Artaud

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos. — Antonin Artaud

I myself am an absolute abyss. — Antonin Artaud

This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the
bourgeoisie.
In comparison with the lucidity of van Gogh, psychiatry is no better than a den of apes who are themselves obsessed and persecuted and who possess nothing to mitigate the most appalling states of anguish and human suffocation but a ridiculous terminology. To a man, this whole gang of pected scoundrels and patented quacks are all erotomaniacs. — Antonin Artaud

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

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination, — Antonin Artaud

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose. — Antonin Artaud

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat. — Antonin Artaud

The cinema implies a total inversion of values, a complete upheaval of optics, of perspective and logic. It is more exciting than phosphorus, more captivating than love. — Antonin Artaud

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. — Antonin Artaud

Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all. — Antonin Artaud

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows. — Antonin Artaud