Skip to content

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

— Antonin Artaud Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Another quote →

More quotes by Antonin Artaud

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.

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.

Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947)

Where there is a stink of shit
there is a smell of being.

All Antonin Artaud quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Antonin Artaud (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.