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.
All writing is filth.
Everything is going badly because at this moment the morbid conscience has an essential interest in not recovering from its own sickness.
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.
No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
The actor is an athlete of the heart.
I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.
I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this – I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.
This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.
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.
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.
Those who live, live off the dead.
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.
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.
It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themselves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after Van Gogh’s stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.
However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.
We must believe in a sense of life renewed by the theater, a sense of life in which man fearlessly makes himself master of what does not yet exist, and brings it into being. And everything that has not been born can still be brought to life if we are not satisfied to remain mere recording organisms.
And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.