I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
JEAN COCTEAUI know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
-
-
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
JEAN COCTEAU -
I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
JEAN COCTEAU -
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.
JEAN COCTEAU -
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.
JEAN COCTEAU -
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
JEAN COCTEAU -
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
JEAN COCTEAU -
One must not mistake majority for truth.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Art is science in the flesh.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
JEAN COCTEAU -
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
JEAN COCTEAU -
You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
JEAN COCTEAU -
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 COCTEAU -
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.
JEAN COCTEAU -
I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
JEAN COCTEAU -
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
JEAN COCTEAU -
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.
JEAN COCTEAU -
The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
JEAN COCTEAU -
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
JEAN COCTEAU