I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
JEAN COCTEAUI know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
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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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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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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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Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.
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Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
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Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Art is science in the flesh.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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Living is a horizontal fall.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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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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