123 Quotes by Antonin Artaud

In the manifested world, metaphysically speaking, evil is the permanent law, and what is good is an effort and already one more cruelty added to the other.

Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness.

The fixation of the theater in one language – written words, music, lights, noises – betokens its imminent ruin.

The theater is the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice.

I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this – I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

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.

And war is wonderful, isn’t it? For it’s war, isn’t it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.

And when we tell ourselves we have reached the paroxysm of horror, blood and flouted laws of poetry that consecrates revolt, we obliged to advance still further into an endless vertigo.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.