Top Antonin Artaud Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Antonin Artaud Biography

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (French: [aʁto]; 4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde.

Read about Antonin Artaud in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Antonin Artaud Quotes

Actors are athletes of the heart.

Actors, Athlete, Athletes, Heart

Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.

Body, Lives, Rotting, Soul, Tortured, World

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.

Giving, Impact, Proved, Space, Words

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

Man, Men, Quite, Unnecessary, Young

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.

Truth, Dice, Affirmation, Living, Risking, Uncertain

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.

Absence, Drug, Opium, Order, Work

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

Theatre, Diligence, Cruelty, Unrelenting, Strictness

Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.

War, Poetry, Drug, Admittedly, Crime, Public

By suicide I introduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will. . . now I choose the direction of my thought and the direction of my faculties, my tendencies, my reality.

Suicide, Suicidal, Reality, Things, Direction

I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves.

Addresses, Believe, Flesh, Found, Heart, Realm

There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.

Brothel, Brothels, Theatre

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.

Race, Europe, Law, Embalming, Close, Cracks

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

Tragedy, Enough, Stage, Longer, Bring

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.

Book, Consented, Opens, Reality, Writing

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

Beautiful, Directly, Lose, Strikes, Sun, True Beauty

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

Heart, Athlete, Actors, Actor

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.

Minds, Part, People, Pigs, Writing

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

Death, Living, Real, Terror

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

Moving, Shadow, Use, Theater, Instruments

I myself am an absolute abyss.

Absolute, Absolutes, Abyss

1