Jean Cocteau Quotes
My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.
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.
The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.
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.
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
Without opium, plans, marriages and journeys appear to me just as foolish as if someone falling out of a window were to hope to make friends with the occupants of the room before which he passes.
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.
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.
I have never felt any connection with my family. There isI must say simplysomething in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.
