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 COCTEAUIf it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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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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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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The joy of the young is to disobey.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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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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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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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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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
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