When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
JEAN COCTEAUI have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
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A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
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The only way to kill death is through photography.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.
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