Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
JEAN COCTEAULiving is a horizontal fall.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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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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Never 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.
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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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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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One must not mistake majority for truth.
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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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When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don’t. I have a knack for disturbing.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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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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Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
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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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When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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