Antonin Artaud

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.

Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

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.

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.

It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.

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

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.

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

Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

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.

There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is fundamentally antisocial, it is only by a usurpation of powers that the organized body of society opposes the natural inclination of humanity.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).

I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.