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» Quotes by Jean Cocteau »
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one rem...
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Movies
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardene...
Poetry
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long...
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious...
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss...
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order ...
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with t...
Art
Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go to far.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his l...
Poetry
Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write pl...
Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming ...
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train rac...
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activene...
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death wi...
I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you d...
I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy o...
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes t...
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save...
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a sp...
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Life is a horizontal fall.
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his d...
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ...
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us i...
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up ag...
Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking towa...
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the wor...
Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produc...
That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a...
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived id...
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer the...
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of ord...
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is trul...
The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no l...
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Poetry
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Poetry
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...
The trouble about the Academie is that by the time they get around to ...
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderst...
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters w...
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to ...
There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This p...
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit k...
Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Vistor Hugo.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of th...
Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has...
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that ...
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see...