Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
JEAN COCTEAUFrench people are Italian people in a bad mood.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
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When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don’t. I have a knack for disturbing.
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After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
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May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
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Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.
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Living is a horizontal fall.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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