Quotes from Antonin Artaud

She bites God in the wrist]

Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.

The life we lead is a front for all which the frightful criminal filthymindedness of some of us has left us. A grotesque masquerade of acts & sentiments. Our ideas are only the leftovers of a breath, breath of our choked & trussed lungs.

Estoy en el punto donde ya no toco a la vida, pero tengo en mí todos los apetitos y la titilación insistente del ser. Sólo tengo una ocupación: rehacerme.

Baz? bilinçler vard?r ki, basit bir çeliÅŸki yüzünden kendilerini öldürebilirler ve bunun için de deli, saptanm?? ve kataloÄŸa girmiÅŸ bir deli olmak gerekmez; tersine, saÄŸl?kl? olmak ve akl? kendi taraf?nda bulundurmak yeterlidir.

It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.

The extreme point of mysticism, I hold it now in the real and in my body, like a toilet broom.

All those who have vantage points in their spirit... ; all those who are masters of their language; all those for whom words have a meaning; all those for whom there exist sublimities in the soul and currents of thought; all those who are the spirit of the times, and have named these currents of thought -- and I am thinking of their precise works, of that automatic grinding that delivers their spirit to the winds -- are pigs.

I have never written except to fix and perpetuate the memory of these cuts, these scissions, these ruptures, these abrupt and bottomless falls.

VERBLUEFFENDE ENTDECKUNG. HIMMEL PHYSIKALISCH VERNICHTET. ERDE NUR EINE MINUTE VON SIRIUS ENTFERNT! KEIN FIRMAMENT MEHR.

Postoji u meni nešto užasno, što raste i što ne poti?e od mene samog, ve? iz mrakova koje nosim u sebi, što poti?e odande gde ?ovekova duša ne zna gde po?inje a gde se završava njegovo Ja, niti šta ga je nateralo da zapo?ne onako kako misli da je zapo?eo.

A thing named is a dead thing, and it's dead because it is set apart…

much more than by its army, its administration, its institutions, and its police, society is held together with spells.

Sans un élément de cruauté à la base de tout spectacle, le théâtre n'est pas possible.

Nel suo pensiero io sono l'ago che scorre, ed è la sua anima che accetta l'ago e l'accoglie.

There is nothing more useless than a organ. When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty.

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.

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

Nunca ninguém escreveu ou pintou, esculpiu, modelou, construiu, inventou, sem ser para sair realmente do inferno.

Nous ne sommes pas libres. Et le ciel peut encore nous tomber sur la tête. Et le théâtre est fait pour nous apprendre d'abord cela

There where it smells of shit it smells of being. Man could just as well not have shat, not have opened the anal pouch, but he chose to shit as he would have chosen to live instead of consenting to live dead.

And do you know what the Americans and the Russians make their atoms with? They make them with the microbes of god. - You are raving, Mr Artaud. You are mad. - I am not raving. I am not mad. I'm telling you that microbes have been reinvented in order to impose a new idea of god.

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.

To confront the metaphysics I have created for myself, in accordance with the void I carry within me.