Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
JEAN COCTEAULying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
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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 joy of the young is to disobey.
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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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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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Living is a horizontal fall.
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I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
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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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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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