Artaud Theatre Quotes & Sayings

I think about pinball, and how being a kid's like being shot up the firing lane and there's no veering left or right; or you're just sort of propelled. But once you clear the top, like when you're sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, suddenly there's a thousand different paths you can take, some amazing, others not. Tiny little differences in angles and speed'll totally alter what happens to you later, so a fraction of an inch to the right, and the ball'll just hit a pinger and a dinger and fly down between your flippers, no messing, a waste of 10 p. But a fraction to the left and it's action in the play zone, bumpers and kickers, ramps and slingshots and fame on the high-score table. — David Mitchell

I hardly see myself as a futurist. — Dick Wolf

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

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write. — Nikki Giovanni

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

Shall we not go on in so great a cause? Go forward and not backward. Courage, brethren; and on, on to the victory! — Joseph Smith Jr.

We encounter electromagnetic fields every single day. Many invisible waves and vibrations cross in the space around us. Even the physical pains and emotional moods of other people around us affect our lives. Our souls match/mirror the vibrations of other people faster than our bodies. — Hina Hashmi

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 wanted a partner; I wanted it to be sweet. But sometimes the need couldn't wait. Sometimes the need made me a monster. — G.L. Tomas

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

I work with wonderful people who support me. And, my beliefs are that the business needs to serve the family rather than the family serve the business. — Kathy Ireland

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

The writers job is to get naked,
To hide nothing.
To look away from nothing.
To look at it.
To not blink.
To be not embarrassed or shamed of it.
Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is.
Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury! — Harry Crews

I request that they may be considered in confidence, until the members of Congress are fully possessed of their contents, and shall have had opportunity to deliberate on the consequences of their publication; after which time, I submit them to your wisdom. — John Adams

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

For he who has died has been freed from sin ... 14 For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law but under grace. — Paul The Apostle

Life is challenging but I'm always up for a challenge. — Venus Williams

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

If I can't get people to commit themselves on whether or not there is a square root of two, then I won't touch on God or anything here — Tom Lehrer

Invest in inflation. It is the only thing going up. — Will Rogers

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