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.
JEAN COCTEAUAfter 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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The only way to kill death is through photography.
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Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
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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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Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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One must not mistake majority for truth.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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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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It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
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One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.
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The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.
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There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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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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It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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