Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)
French poet, novelist, painter, and filmmaker.
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.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed.
We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
The joy of youth is to disobey, but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Life is a horizontal fall.