Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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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Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.
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The extreme limit of wisdom, that’s what the public calls madness.
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Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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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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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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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.
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