A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
JEAN COCTEAUIf it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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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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Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.
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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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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
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We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
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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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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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Art is science in the flesh.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.
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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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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
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It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
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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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There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
JEAN COCTEAU