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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses that creativity and inspiration are often felt more acutely in their absence, suggesting the importance of both presence and absence in the creative process.
Antonin Artaud emphasizes that it is not the act of creation itself that drives him, but rather the lack of inspiration that compels him to work. This paradox highlights the complex relationship between absence and presence in the realm of creativity; it suggests that without experiencing the void of inspiration, the value of creativity may not be appreciated, as the longing for that inspiration fuels the creative endeavor.
Themes
CreativityInspirationAbsencePresenceArt
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a creative workshop to emphasize the importance of inspiration.
More from Antonin Artaud
All quotes βCruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
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.
Antonin ArtaudRead
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Antonin ArtaudRead
Similar quotes
Every time you write a poem itβs apocalyptic. Youβre revealing who you really are to yourself.
Li-Young LeeRead
I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.
Paul RandRead
Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry besides the aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, SHOULD be disappointed. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what will be produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.
Dean YoungRead
Movies become living organisms that graduate from a filmmaker's sphere of influence and pretty much look back and tell you how they need to be said goodbye to. A movie often turns around and looks at you and says, "Here is who I am, and that's maybe now how you see me, but that's who I've become." And you've got to be open enough to go with that.
Steven SpielbergRead
Perspective is a most subtle discovery in mathematical studies, for by means of lines it causes to appear distant that which is near, and large that which is small.
Leonardo Da VinciRead
She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott.
Alfred Lord TennysonRead