Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)
French poet, novelist, painter, and filmmaker.
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.
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.
Respect movements, flee schools.
Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.
Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas .
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
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.
Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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 original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.
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.