Activity

Celine: [...] My mother worshiped rich people, you see. So what do you expect, it colored me too. I wasn't quite convinced. No. But I didn't dare have an opinion, no, no. My mother who was in lace up to her neck would never have dreamed of wearing any. That was for the customers. Never. It wasn't d…

Celine: [...] It was extreme poverty. Tougher than poverty, because in poverty you can let yourself go, degenerate, get drunk, but this was poverty which keeps up, dignified poverty. It was terrible. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old l…

Cocteau: I will recount one thing; then vou must let me rest. You perhaps know the work of the painter Domergue? The long calendar art, I am afraid. He had a domestique in those days —a "housemaid" who would make the beds, fill the coal scuttles. We all gathered in those days at the Cafe Rotonde. A…

Interviewer: Do you keep a sort of abstract potential reader or viewer in mind when you work?

Cocteau: You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle. It is fichu.

A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. "The world is my representation." Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transfo…