Antonin Artaud

Dramatist

1896-09-04 – 1948-03-04

Quotes by Antonin Artaud

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• All writing is filth

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• All writing is filth

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• 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.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• Where there is a stink of shit, there is a smell of being.

  Read quote