Google
|
The quotations are arranged by author name.
Current counts: Authors: 8,146. Quotations: 38,970
Select the first character of the author's last name that you want to look at:
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
|
| Jean Cocteau
A film is a petrified fountain of thought. A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter. An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious. Art is science made clear.Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs. Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels. He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world. I am a lie who always speaks the truth. I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another. I love cats because I love my home and after a while they become its visible soul. If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it. In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator. Life is a horizontal fall. Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort. One must be a living man and a posthumous artist. 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. Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier's wrist. The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends. The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. The trouble about the Academie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed. The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood. There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul. There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard. Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Vistor Hugo. We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like? When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work. You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive. |
|
Sports Quotations.
Show Business Quotations.
|