Jean Cocteau Quotes

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Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.

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

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

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.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

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