Jean Cocteau Quotes

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

El poeta es un mentiroso que siempre dice la verdad.

A little too much is just enough for me.

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.

Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.

I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood’s “Open Sesame”:

Once upon a time…

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.

It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.

Les expériences dangereuses, le monde les accepte dans le domaine de l’art parce qu’il ne prend pas l’art au sérieux, mais il les condamne dans la vie.

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

Poetry is a machine that manufactures love. Its other virtues escape me.

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

Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier’s wrist.