An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Cocteau’s remark suggests that art is fundamentally an act of making rather than an act of theorizing. Like a plant that grows according to its nature without being able to explain botany, the artist’s primary “knowledge” is embodied in practice—intuition, craft, and the pressures of imagination—often resistant to tidy verbal accounts. The quip also warns audiences against overvaluing artists’ explanations of their own work: commentary may be post hoc, defensive, or misleading compared with what the work itself communicates. At the same time, it implies a distinction between the creator and the critic or historian, whose role is precisely to articulate frameworks that the artist may neither possess nor need.