123 Quotes by Antonin Artaud

...much more than by its army, its administration, its institutions, and its police, society is held together with spells.

[She bites God in the wrist]

Nous ne sommes pas libres. Et le ciel peut encore nous tomber sur la tête. Et le théâtre est fait pour nous apprendre d'abord cela

[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

All those who have vantage points in their spirit... ; all those who are masters of their language; all those for whom words have a meaning; all those for whom there exist sublimities in the soul and currents of thought; all those who are the spirit of the times, and have named these currents of thought -- and I am thinking of their precise works, of that automatic grinding that delivers their spirit to the winds --are pigs.

The cinema implies a total inversion of values, a complete upheaval of optics, of perspective and logic. It is more exciting than phosphorus, more captivating than love.

How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.

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

Keiner hat je geschrieben oder gemalt, geformt, modelliert, gebaut oder erfunden, es sei denn, um der Hölle zu entkommen.