I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
JEAN COCTEAUListen 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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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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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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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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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
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Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.
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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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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 have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
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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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