123 Quotes by Antonin Artaud

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

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

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.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Ah! How neatly tied, in these people, is the umbilical cord of morality! Since they left their mothers they have never sinned, have they? They are apostles, they are the descendants of priests; one can only wonder from what source they draw their indignation, and above all how much they have pocketed to do this, and in any case what it has done for them.

There is nothing more useless than a organ. When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.

I know that I believe in ETERNAL LIFE, and that I believe here in its entire meaning. I regret to live in a world where witches and wizards hide, and moreover, where there are so few true wizards.

I have never written except to fix and perpetuate the memory of these cuts, these scissions, these ruptures, these abrupt and bottomless falls.