Quotes from 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.

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

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.

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.

If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

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

I myself am an absolute abyss.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

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.

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.

For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.

We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.

All writing is filth

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness.

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.