And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .

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

The actor is an athlete of the heart.

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.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

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

You're a romantic. What's romantic about a guy wanting to go somewhere and actually getting there?

..it has always been so much my desire to paint for those who don’t know the artistic side of a painting.

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

In Zen, poverty is voluntary, and considered not really as poverty so much as simplicity, freedom, unclutteredness.

Through His Spirit, the Spirit of prayer, our life may be one of continual prayer. The Spirit of prayer will help you become an intercessor, asking great things of God for those around you.

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true.

This book is dedicated to the rule breakers, the troublemakers, and the revolutionaries. Sometimes the hand that feeds you needs a good bite.

Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger.

There are many lights in the shadows and many shadows in the lights; lots of talents in the shades, lots of incompetents in the luminosities

Umberto Eco is the owner of a large personal library of almost 30,000 books that he has not read. [To him] read books are far less valuable than unread ones.