Jean Cocteau Quotes

So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are-objective pictures. He mumbled that he wasn't quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, "There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is." Picasso looked at it and said, "She is rather small, isn't she? And flat?"

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist. Why should I blame anyone but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?" -Pablo Picasso.

What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky, and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart

Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

In general, in all my films, I choose to create a certain mistrust, rather than claiming that what I'm showing onscreen is an accurate reproduction of reality. I want people to question what they are seeing onscreen. In the same way as I used the narrator, I also used black and white, because it creates a distance toward what's being seen. I see the film as an artifact rather than a reliable reconstruction of a reality that we cannot know.