Artaud On Theatre Quotes & Sayings

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

My theory of hitting was just to watch the ball as it came in and hit it. — Tommy Lasorda

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

I'm pretty spiritual; I believe a lot in the spirit of man. — Sylvester Stallone

Love isn't blind. It's blinding. — Lesley Livingston

In New York City, the common bats fly only at twilight. Brick-bats fly at all hours. — George D. Prentice

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

I kind of understand now why people freak out when they see celebrities that they love, because that's how I feel about every single Muppet. — Rashida Jones

Our skills, you will find, could be our jailers. — Terry Pratchett

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

How well you do in life shouldn't depend on how well your parents did. — Robert D. Putnam

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

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

A half-truth is even more dangerous than a lie. A lie, you can detect at some stage, but half a truth is sure to mislead you for long. — Anurag Shourie

It is the conquest of this fear that adds half the charm to climbing. — Whipplesnaith

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

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