When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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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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.
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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.
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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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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.
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The only way to kill death is through photography.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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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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The joy of the young is to disobey.
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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