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
magic consideration force
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.
men literature want
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
dream law fever
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
theatre brothels
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
tragedy enough stage
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
order break-through theatre
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
death long-ago one-day
We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.
depression ideas delirium-tremens
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.
lying believe men
The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm.
Those who live, live off the dead.
beautiful true-beauty sun
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
truth dice affirmation
I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
men ideas mad
And what is an authentic madman? It is 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. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
moving shadow use
The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.