Quotes by Antonin Artaud

• Those who live, live off the dead.
• 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.
• Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
• No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
• All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
• Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
• Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.
• 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.
• 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.
• We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
• 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.
• Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.