Antonin Artaud

Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud (4 September 1896 – 4 March 1948), was a French playwright, poet, actor and theatre director. Antonin is a diminutive form of Antoine "little Anthony", and was among a list of names which Artaud used throughout his writing career.

Read more about Antonin Artaud:  Background, Theatre of Cruelty, Philosophical Views, Influence, Bibliography

Famous quotes by 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 (1896–1948)

    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 (1896–1948)

    It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)

    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.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)

    But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)