The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
Life is a horizontal fall.
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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.
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
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.
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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.
