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:

    With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)

    The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything—gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness—rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations.... To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
    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)

    And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)

    Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.
    Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)