List of Antonin Artaud Quotes

[defines A Madman As] A Man Who Preferred To Become Mad,in The Socially Accepted Sense Of The Word, Rather Than Forfeit A Certain Superior Idea Of Human Honor.

Squander Your Riches Far From This Unfeeling Body To Which No Season, Either Spiritual Or Sensual, Makes Any Difference.

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).

For The Lost Are Lost By Nature, All Your Ideas Of Moral Regeneration Will Make No Difference, There Is An Innate Determinism, There Is An Undeniable Incurability In Suicide, Crime, Idiocy, Madness, There Is An Invincible Cuckoldry In Man, There Is A Congenital Weakness Of The Character, A Castration Of The Mind.

The Race Of Prophets Is Extinct. Europe Is Becoming Set In Its Ways, Slowly Embalming Itself Beneath The Wrappings Of Its Borders, Its Factories, Its Law-courts And Its Universities. The Frozen Mind Cracks Between The Mineral Staves Which Close Upon It.

I Do Not Like Detached Creation. Neither Can I Conceive Of The Mind As Detached From Itself. Each Of My Works, Each Diagram Of Myself, Each Glacial Flowering Of My Inmost Soul Dribbles Over Me.

With Society And Its Public, There Is No Longer Any Other Language Than That Of Bombs, Barricades, And All That Follows.

[nietzsche's] Definition Of Cruelty Informs Artaud's Own, Declaring That All Art Embodies And Intensifies The Underlying Brutalities Of Life To Recreate The Thrill Of Experience ... Although Artaud Did Not Formally Cite Nietzsche, [their Writing] Contains A Familiar Persuasive Authority, A Similar Exuberant Phraseology, And Motifs In Extremis.

By Suicide I Introduce My Design In Nature, I Shall For The First Time Give Things The Shape Of My Will ... Now I Choose The Direction Of My Thought And The Direction Of My Faculties, My Tendencies, My Reality.

The Actor Is Merely A Crude Empiricist, A Practitioner Guided By Vague Instinct.

Hell Is Of This World And There Are Men Who Are Unhappy Escapees From Hell, Escapees Destined Eternally To Reenact Their Escape.

These Terrifying Forms Which Advance On Me, I Feel That The Despair They Bring Is Alive. It Slips Into This Nucleus Of Life Beyond Which The Paths Of Eternity Extend. It Is Truly An Eternal Separation. They Slip Their Knives Into This Center Where I Feel Myself A Man, They Sever Those Vital Ties Which Bind Me To The Dream Of My Lucid Reality.