Artaud Quotes

“Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”
― Antonin Artaud

“Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c'est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit, qui nous pétrifie, qui nous stabilise et nous empêche de prendre contact avec la force qui est dessous, que l'on appelle l'énergie pensante, la force vitale, le déterminisme des échanges, les menstrues de la lune ou tout ce qu'on voudra.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“He mused on this village of his, which had sprung up in this place, amid the stones, like the gnarled undergrowth of the valley. All Artaud's inhabitants were inter-related, all bearing the same surname to such an extent that they used double-barrelled names from the cradle up, to distinguish one from another. At some antecedent date an ancestral Artaud had come like an outcast, to establish himself in this waste land. His family had grown with the savage vitality of the vegetation, drawing nourishment from this stone till it had become a tribe, then the tribe turned to a community, till they could not sort out their cousinage, going back for generations. They inter-married with unblushing promiscuity.”
― Émile Zola, La Faute de l'abbé Mouret

“Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally,

god,
and with god
his organs.

For you can tie me up if you wish,
but there is nothing more useless than an organ.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls
and this wrong side out will be his real place.”
― Antonin Artaud, Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu

“Il y a dans toute poésie une contradiction essentielle. La poésie, c'est de la multiplicité broyée et qui rend des flammes. Et la poésie, qui ramène l'ordre, ressuscite d'abord le désordre, le désordre aux aspects enflammés; elle fait s'entre-choquer des aspects qu'elle ramène a un point unique : feu, geste, sang, cri.
Ramener la poésie et l'ordre dans un monde dont l'existence même est un défi a l'ordre, c'est ramener la guerre et la permanence de la guerre; c'est amener un état de cruauté appliqué, c'est susciter une anarchie sans nom, l'anarchie des choses et des aspects qui se réveillent avant de sombrer et de se fondre a nouveau dans l'unité. Mais celui qui réveille cette anarchie dangereuse en est toujours la première victime”
― Antonin Artaud

“Especially his body-his name was Antonin Artaud- which was thin nasty sick mangled distorted ravaged by drugs and by desires which had been repressed by thinking.
The body, the kid said further, when not being robbed blind by family and religion, has an infinite capacity for self-transformation.
He had actually talked in a much more disgusting manner. Before he had died.
The punk boys were the ones who followed him. After his death.
All of them had fucked their mothers and were no longer colonized.”
― Kathy Acker, Pussy, King of the Pirates