Not only should you not accept a prize. You should not try to deserve one either.
JEAN COCTEAUListen 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.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
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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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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.
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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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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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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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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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The only way to kill death is through photography.
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Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
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Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
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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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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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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
JEAN COCTEAU