Antonin Artaud

"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."

11 likes

Source: Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society. Essay by Antonin Artaud, 1947.

About the author

Antonin Artaud

Antonin Artaud

Playwright, Actor, Theorist

Antonin Artaud was a French playwright and theorist known for his radical ideas on theater and the concept of the 'theater of cruelty.'

All quotes by Antonin Artaud →

Same author

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

See all →
Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist

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

Read quote
Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist

"There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity."

Read quote
Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist

"But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes."

Read quote
Antonin Artaud Playwright, Actor, Theorist

"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."

Read quote