Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
JEAN COCTEAUIt 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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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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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Living is a horizontal fall.
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My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
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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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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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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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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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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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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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