Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
JEAN COCTEAUThere’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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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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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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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 know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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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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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
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May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
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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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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
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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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If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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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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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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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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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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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.
JEAN COCTEAU