Antonin Artaud Quotes

Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.

Colour can raise the dead.

Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes.

The power and reach of music should never be underestimated.

I would think, as an artist, it's inescapable that you'll be affected by the world around you.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

Art moves. Hence its civilizing power.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.

The art of Frida Kahlo is a ribbon around a bomb.

Tis not your work, but Love's. Love, unperceived, A more ideal Artist he than all, Came, drew your pencil from you, made those eyes Darker than the darkest pansies, and that hair More black than ashbuds in the front of March.

Panic is an incredibly catalyzing creative force. And almost out of sheer necessity, I found I had to talk about myself and my real life as it is effectively lived by me.

I'm interested in pressure, I'm interested in duress. All the great works of art, or film or literature, in my opinion, have elements of those in them.

Art is a self-replicating force.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

Being American is, I think, a very difficult thing in art, because all the elements are European.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it's bidding.

I was inspired by [Michelangelo] Antonioni's Red Desert - very big and moody.

Art being so much greater than ourselves, it will not give up once it has taken hold.

If somehow I can, before I leave this earth, combine my absolutely mad freedom and excitement with truth, then I will have done something.

Because I'm pure inside, the music that comes out of me is a life-giving thing. Like water.

For what made that in glory shine so long But poets' Pens, pluckt from Archangels' wings?

I came in with a completely new perspective. I would write songs and they would pick tunes they felt were in the Purple vein.