Antonin Artaud
Antonin Artaud
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonine Artaud, was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth4 September 1896
CountryFrance
roots mind caves
Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.
culture needs bones
Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
light order break-through
The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything - gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness - rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
art magic shadow
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
moments excuse distinction
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
mean men long
So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
lying heart matter
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
flames laughing actors
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.
book writing reality
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.
war poetry drug
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
years ice games
Enough, I shall be understood in ten years by people who will be doing what you do today. Then my geysers will be known, my ice floes will be seen, the secret of adulterating my poisons will have been learned, the games of my soul will be revealed.
heart athlete actors
Actors are athletes of the heart.
suicide suicidal together-again
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
analogies association destruction
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.