All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.
Antonin Artaud

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

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

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.
Antonin Artaud

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.
Antonin Artaud

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

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

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.
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.
Antonin Artaud

Those who live, live off the dead.
Antonin Artaud


We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
Antonin Artaud

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.
Antonin Artaud

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