Jean Cocteau Quotes

The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.

When I was a little boy, I was reading Dante and I was saying to myself 'Bravo, Dante, Bravo.' It's so beautiful, the music, the sound, the meaning. I felt like calling him by phone, like a friend.

The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape?

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.

Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

All men owe honor to the poets - honor and awe; for they are dearest to the Muse who puts upon their lips the ways of life.

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

The spirit of poetry combines the profundity of the philosopher and the child's delight in bright pictures.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.