Jean Cocteau Quotes

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

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

Mettez un lieu commun en place, nettoyez-le, frottez-le, éclairez-le de telle sorte qu'il frappe avec sa jeunesse et avec la même fraîcheur, le même jet qu'il avait à sa source, vous ferez œuvre de poète. Tout le reste est littérature.

Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

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

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

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

No se debe confundir la verdad con la opinión de la mayoría.

The map of our life is folded in such a way that we cannot see one main road across it, but as it is opened out, we are constantly seeing new side roads. We think we are choosing, and we have no choice.

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.

"A child's reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: "Paul's dying; Paul's going to die"' but he did not believe it. Paul's death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever."

I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.

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.

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.