A Quote by Jean Cocteau

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

Jean Cocteau

Quote Topics

Critics Cultivate Everything First Hated Makes Unique Work Your

Quote Author

Jean Cocteau
French - Novelist
July 5, 1889 - October 11, 1963

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

Jean Cocteau

My ex-husband didn't like my singing. He didn't like my hair. He hated my eyes. Everything. Everything he complimented me on when we first met, he just hated.

La'Porsha Renae

I hated the compound, I hated the dark, dirty room, I hated the filthy bathroom, and I hated everything about it, especially the constant state of terror and fear.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Humanity does not ask to be happy.It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf. Survival first, and then happiness as we can manage it... Take what pleasure you can in the interstices of your work, , but your work is first, learning first, winning is everything because without it there is nothing.

Orson Scott Card

When I first started submitting my work professionally - and we're talking years and years ago - I had no patience for editorial response times. I hated waiting to hear back from people, hated waiting to see my work in print.

Cullen Bunn

There is a price for popularity. Critics look for your weaknesses, your flaws, anything that makes the work seem like a fluke and not seem worthy of all the attention it's getting.

Terry McMillan

I've been pretty well treated by the critics, but the critics who didn't like my comedies hated them with an unbridled passion, and then I would see these same people writing very respectfully about ordinary naturalistic plays.

David Lindsay-Abaire

I love everything about my body. Every bit of it... the cellulite, the stretch marks, everything that I thought at one point was an imperfection, I now realize is everything that makes me unique.

Denise Bidot

Listening is everything. Listening is the whole deal. That's what I think. And I mean that in terms of before you work, after you work, in between work, with your children, with your husband, with your friends, with your mother, with your father. It's everything. And it's where you learn everything.

Meryl Streep

When critics love your film, you love critics. When they hate your film, you hate critics. It's the same everywhere, but maybe especially in France, where we have pretty good critics, except for three or four newspapers that are really dogmatic.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet

I built my [early] career on negative reviews. There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square. They hated my movies. You could never have that happen today. Critics are way too hip.

John Waters

Critics kind never mind! Critics flatter no matter! Critics blame all the same! Do your best damn the rest!

Arthur Conan Doyle

I think your text [script] is everything; it's what informs you; it's what gives you the given circumstances. Then you take that and you add your own creativity and your own spin on things and you make it personal. That's what makes that character and that text unique to you, when you personalize it. I think that's where your job as an actor comes in.