Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
JEAN COCTEAUAfter the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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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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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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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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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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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
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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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When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
JEAN COCTEAU