Antonin Artaud's Quotes

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

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.

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.

When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

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.

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.

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

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

Those who live, live off the dead.

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

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

Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.