Poetry is a religion with no hope.
JEAN COCTEAUPoetry is a religion with no hope.
JEAN COCTEAUNever 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.
JEAN COCTEAUI feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
JEAN COCTEAUThe extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
JEAN COCTEAUBeauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
JEAN COCTEAUSince these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
JEAN COCTEAULiving is a horizontal fall.
JEAN COCTEAUThe dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
JEAN COCTEAUDo as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
JEAN COCTEAUPoetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
JEAN COCTEAUI have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
JEAN COCTEAUArt is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
JEAN COCTEAUIt is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
JEAN COCTEAUThe eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
JEAN COCTEAUWe must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
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.
JEAN COCTEAU