Quotes from Arthur Adamov

Things always happen in series.

Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.

The crisis of our time is essentially a religious crisis. It is a matter of life or death.

A stage play ought to be the point of intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, or, in other words, the display, the manifestation of the hidden.

Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.

Perhaps the sad and empty language that today's flabby humanity pours forth, will, in all its horror, in all its boundless absurdity, re-echo in the heart of a solitary man who is awake, and then perhaps that man, suddenly realizing that he does not understand, will begin to understand.

The only courageous act is to speak in the first person.

We are accused of pessimism, as though pessimism were but one among a number of possible attitudes, as if man were capable of choosing between two alternatives.

It remains open to question whether anything that confines itself to the human sphere could ever attain anything but the subhuman.

Misery's fine -- as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

The reason why most absurdist plays take place in a no man's land with only two characters is mainly financial.

From whatever point he starts, whatever path he follows, modern man comes to the same conclusion: behind its visible appearances, life hides a meaning that is eternally inaccessible to penetration by the spirit that seeks for its discovery, caught in the dilemma of being aware that it is impossible to find it, and yet also impossible to renounce the hopeless quest.

It was Strindberg, or more exactly, A Dream Play, that incited me to write for the theater.

I know I earn less at my primary school than you do, but I don't have to work as hard at my primary school.

This peculiar method of work, paradoxically enough, saved me. Once I was sure that, as usual, I should be able to show the identity of all human destiny ... I found myself free to make the characters act, to create situations.

Things always happen in series.

The crisis of our time is essentially a religious crisis. It is a matter of life or death.

The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything.... To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand.

The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis.

Theatre as I conceive it is wholly and absolutely tied to performance. I think that performance is only the projection to the senses of situations and images.

Uneven! Easy to say! As if you could always go straight to the point!

It is nasty when you're playing in someone else's house to point out that they don't have enough balls.

What is there? I know first of all that I am. But who am I? All I know of myself is that I suffer. And if I suffer it is because at the origin of myself there is mutilation, separation. I am separated. What I am separated from - I cannot name it. But I am separated.

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.