ANTONIN ARTAUD QUOTES
French playwright, actor & theatre director (1896-1948)
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theater and Its Double
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
preface, The Theater and Its Double
However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practise to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
letter to Andre Gide, Feb. 10, 1935
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
Selected Writings
All true language
is incomprehensible,
Like the chatter
of a beggar's teeth.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Ci-Git
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
Selected Writings
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theatre and Its Double
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
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
"On Suicide"
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
Selected Writings
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 a Genica Athanasiou
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Watchfiends & Rack Screams
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theater and Its Double
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
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
attributed, Memories for Tomorrow
You are quite unnecessary, young man!
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
The Theatre and Its Double
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
preface, The Theater and Its Double
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
General Security: The Liquidation of Opium