Jean Cocteau Quotes

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

I know I'm not gonna please everybody when I make a record. I don't let that affect any of my decisions.

Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.

Young people have realised that an artist is in charge of what they're doing - this crazy cynicism that artists were puppets has disappeared.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

Poetry is a means of redemption.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad.

If I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it.

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

When people asked to buy my work I always said no. I'd had this rather rarefied idea that I didn't want money going through my head while I was making work. But after the car crash I realized that none of my work was owned by anyone. After that, I grew up a bit.

Poetry, I have discovered, is always unexpected and always as faithful and honest as dreams.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

The only way artists can do things is to do it for themselves. Trying to second guess what the public wants or likes is kind of a fool's game.

As we speak of poetical beauty, so ought we to speak of mathematical beauty and medical beauty. But we do not do so; and that reason is that we know well what is the object of mathematics, and that it consists in proofs, and what is the object of medicine, and that it consists in healing. But we do not know in what grace consists, which is the object of poetry.

I never thought in terms of a "breakthrough" film. I wasn't looking for fame or a career path into Hollywood. I was doing it for myself. I just wanted to make a film that I really loved. If other people liked it, great. But you can never guess what other people are going to like.

Sure, having my pictures taken in the nude and doing things that I did got me in the door but it didn't keep me in the room. To have lasted as long as I've lasted, obviously, I have to have something more going for me.

A lot of people thought I got famous as a studio artist, then decided to cash in on it. But it actually was just a matter of survival for many years, and I felt it was really important for me to be able to say whatever I wanted with my street art and fine art.