Jean Cocteau Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

  Jean Cocteau

  Writing, Knack, Painting

• What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

  Jean Cocteau

  Running, Writing, Eye

  "The Difficulty of Being". Book by Jean Cocteau, 1947.

• The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Writing, Reality, Spirit

• In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.

  Jean Cocteau

  Pain, Memories, Believe

  Jean Cocteau (1990). “Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure”, Peter Owen Publishers

• After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

  Jean Cocteau

  Writing, Temptation, Poison

• 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.

  Jean Cocteau

  Fall, Writing, Play

  Vogue Magazine, May 1983.

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