123 Quotes by Antonin Artaud

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

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.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

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.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.