Antonin Artaud Quotes

From All the Best Quotes

Home    Author Index    Subject Index

Custom Search

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948): French playwright, poet and theatre director. A Surrealist theoretician, he introduced the idea of the Theatre of Cruelty. He suffered from lifelong mental disorders.

Antonin Artaud Quotes.



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

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

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair. 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

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

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