Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
There are those who go to the theatre as they would go to a brothel.
The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.
Life consists of burning up questions.
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.
We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
How hard is it, when everything encourages us to sleep, though we may look about us with conscious, clinging eyes, to wake and yet look about us as in a dream, with eyes that no longer know their function and whose gaze is turned inward.
There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.
All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.
I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.
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.
Artaud sought to remove aesthetic distance, bringing the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life. By turning theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed rather than protected, Artaud was committing an act of cruelty upon them.
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Then we might even come to see that it is our veneration for what has already been created, however beautiful and valid it may be, that petrifies us.
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Like all magic cultures expressed by appropriate hieroglyphs, the true theater has its shadows too, and, of all languages and all arts, the theater is the only one left whose shadows have shattered their limitations.
Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.
Excuse my absolute freedom. I refuse to make a distinction between any of the moments of myself.
We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.