Quotes from Julian Beck

The power of art is the power of truth.

these are the epics of western culture these are the flutes of china and the east everything must be rewritten

In the morning movement is linear, in the afternoon circular, in the evening pendular, at night it retraces, restudies, reobserves, sidling backwards, and in the grey dawn briefly at 5:03 for a second it becomes a point, motionless.

Life is being dreamed. An old mirage while we live in the desert.

In prison we become the prisoners even of our dreams.

Time in the theatre is real, time in the cinema illusory. The theatre is primary, consequently it is first of all SPACE. The first plays took place in space and in a monumental slice of actual time.

How can we liberate love for each other if we do not liberate love.

The purpose of the theatre is to serve the needs of the people. The people have no servants. The people serve themselves. The people need revolution, to change the world, life itself.

We are a feelingless people. If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering ... we would go into the streets and stop the war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killing, stop destruction.

In Paradise Now we looked for illogical catalysts with which to precipitate the age of freedom. We consulted the oracles, we used the arcs of our bodies, our lurching minds, incantation, raising and lowering body heat, breath, wind, human contact, patterns of light, spells, rituals, visions, dreams.

Theatre is like a boat, it is only so big, but uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of the tides.

What magic, what alchemical changes, unexpected, unknown as yet to man, can produce a state of freedom in a society in which it is not possible for one of us to be free until we are all free?

But the truth is influential, it is powerful, it reaches the recesses of the mind. You cannot ask the truth not to exert its powers. The truth is one of the most important instruments in the people's struggle for food and freedom. We are out to exercise the occult powers of the truth.

There is something wrong when I go to the theatre whose province is the world and instead of being brought closer to the world I am cut off from it.

There is a misery of the body and a misery of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we looked at them, poured nectar into our mouths, and the grass became bread, we would still be sad. We live in a system that manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its mill, the waters of sorrow.

The power of art is the power of truth.

Dinosaurs and dodos come and go, and we?

Society exists to transcend itself, and the progressive force of all evolution is the poetic imagination, the teleological instinct that moves with the organic principle of all evolution, to take possession of new forms of life, new fields of consciousness.

I do not like the Broadway theatre because it does not know how to say hello. The tone of voice is false, the mannerisms are false, the sex is false, ideal, the Hollywood world of perfection, the clean image, the well pressed clothes, the well scrubbed anus, odorless, inhuman, of the Hollywood actor, the Broadway star. And the terrible false dirt of Broadway, the lower depths in which the dirt is imitated, inaccurate.

You cannot be free if you are contained within a fiction.

There is a misery of the body and a misery of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we looked at them, poured nectar into our mouths, and the grass became bread, we would still be sad. We live in a system that manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm, and we drown down, dead, too soon... uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.