Quotes by Jean Cocteau

• There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
• The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
• Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
• Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
• Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
• Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
• Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
• The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
• The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
• Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
• You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
• When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
• The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
• The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
• The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
• There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
• 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.
• True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
• We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
• What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
• One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
• 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.
• The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
• 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.
• Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
• The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
• A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
• A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
• After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
• All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
• An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
• An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
• Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
• Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
• 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.
• Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
• Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
• I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
• 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.
• Life is a horizontal fall.
• It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
• In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
• Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
• If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
• 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 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.
• I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
• I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
• I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
• Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
• Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
• If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.