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Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.

Antonin Artaud

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Antonin Artaud
Age: 51 †
Born: 1896
Born: September 4
Died: 1948
Died: March 4
Actor
Author
Comedy Writer
Director
Essayist
Film Actor
Film Critic
Film Director
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Marseille
France
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud
Strictness
Decisiveness
Unrelenting
Diligence
Cruelty
Theatre

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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.
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The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct.
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If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
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[defines a madman as] 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.
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I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
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The actor is an athlete of the heart.
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A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
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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.
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To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.
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Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
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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.
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Not once more will/I be found with beings/who swallowed the rail of life//And one day I found myself with beings/who swallowed the nail of life/-as soon as I lost my matrix mamma,//and the being twisted under him,/and god poured me back to her/(the motherfucker).
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Those who live, live off the dead.
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I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.
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We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.
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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.
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[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis.
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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.
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We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.
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No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.
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