Quotes from Antonin Artaud

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

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 am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

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

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

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.

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .