Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)
French poet, novelist, painter, and filmmaker.
He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.
I met a young man of nineteen or twenty, who at that time vibrated with all the youth of the world. This was Jean Cocteau, then a passionately imaginative youth to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundations of the Heavenly City.
Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value.
Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.
Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.
Respect movements, flee schools.
Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas .
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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.
Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
The Louvre is like the morgue; one goes there to identify one’s friends.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the perform-ance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism.... The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.