Jean Cocteau quotes:

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

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.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

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.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body."

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.

The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

There are poets and there are grownups.

What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.

What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.

Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents; what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms

The obstinate miner of the void exploits his fertile mine

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

I suppose the artists invented the firm breasts they put on women, and that in reality all women had flabby ones.

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.

Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood - the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

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.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Life is a horizontal fall.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves.

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.

I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted.

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo

The joy of the young is to disobey

Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.

May the devil himself splatter you with dung.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

Living is a horizontal fall.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.

Since these mysteries exceed my grasp, I shall pretend to have organized them.

There's no such thing as love; only proof of love.

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.

Poetry is a religion with no hope.

I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love

Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.

The cinema is death at work.

I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition.

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

Art is science in the flesh.

Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.

Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.