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. — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
There are souls that are incurable and lost to the rest of society. Deprive them of one means of folly, they will invent ten thousand others. They will create subtler, wilder methods, methods that are absolutely DESPERATE. Nature herself is… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows. — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
“This is why a tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome. No, van Gogh was not mad, but his paintings were bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs, whose angle of vision would have been capable of seriously upsetting the spectral conformity of the bourgeoisie. In… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share
“I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
“Insane asylums are deliberate and premeditated receptacles of black magic, and it is not only that doctors encourage magic with their untimely and hybrid therapies, it is that they practice it. If there had been no doctors there would never have been patients, no skeletons of the diseased dead to butcher and flay, for it is through doctors and not… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share
How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose. — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
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… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share
The truth of life lies in the impulsiveness of matter. The mind of man has been poisoned by concepts. Do not ask him to… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference. — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories,… — Antonin Artaud Copy Share Image
