No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

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.

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

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

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.

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.