Jean Cocteau Quotes

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I didn't write this song. Someone was talking in a room. I just wrote down everything they said.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening - like, it feels like if you just listen hard enough, the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

I can clear my mind, and lyrics just come out; it's very easy for me.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

I'm not a writer myself, so I'm forced to try to get what's a sort of an odour or a colour or something I feel in my head from a writer, and that's a... I don't have a recipe for that process. I don't know what it is... it's different every time.

I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down

Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Storecloset it would be charming.