123 Quotes by Antonin Artaud

The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.

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.

The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid.

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols... for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

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.

If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

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

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