Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963)
French poet, novelist, painter, and filmmaker.
Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.
The extreme limit of wisdom — that’s what the public calls madness.
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal... unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.
The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory...
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.
Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.