Antonin Artaud

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I myself am an absolute abyss.”

“Those who live, live off the dead.”

“All writing is filth”

“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.”

“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.”

“Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.”

“I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”

“If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will.”

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

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

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

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

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