"I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born."
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Antonin Artaud quotes (page 3 of 5)
90 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"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."
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"We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human."
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"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."
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"It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation."
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"It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact upon us."
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"I myself am an absolute abyss."
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"All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth."
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"There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death."
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"Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness."
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"Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us."
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"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."
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"Actors are athletes of the heart."
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"I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me."
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"Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination."
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"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."
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"I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him."
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"Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape."
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"The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct."
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