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.
JEAN COCTEAUThe 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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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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Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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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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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
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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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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
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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 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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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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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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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Poetry is a religion with no hope.
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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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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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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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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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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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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