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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 The Theatre and Its Double (1938)

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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.

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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.