Jean Cocteau Quotes

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.

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

Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs.

I would like to be able to convey to you the sound of dead voices, to break open this unbearable tomb of sound, to wrest something more than silhouettes from vanished years and by some unimaginable trick let you hear the ha-ha-ha with which Catulle Mendès accompanied the slightest sentence, the muffled voice of Edmond Rostand or the laughter which Proust smeared over his face with his white-gloved hand and his beard.

We only serve as a model to the portrait of our fame

What is style? Saying complicated things in a simple way.

The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.

Respect movements, flee schools.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.

Last month, coming out of the Rue d'Athènes, where they were showing Le Sang d'un Poète, I told Gide that I couldn't bear to see the film again because each shot is so slow. He replied that I was wrong, that this slowness was a rhythm, and that these slow shots coming one after another formed a special tempo, my tempo, a procedure of my own.
No doubt he's right, and it would be dangerous to upset a rhythm that comes from within oneself, through fear of this rhythm, and to impose another, artificial, one which would not suit it.

Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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

Last night I suffered so much that there was nothing but my pain to distract me from my pain. I had to make it my sole diversion and with good reason. It had thus decreed. It attacked at every point. Then it distributed its troops. It encamped. It so manoeuvred that it was no longer intolerable at any one of its positions, but tolerable at them all. That is to say that the intolerable being distributed, it was this no longer, except as a whole. It was something both tolerable and intolerable. The organ that breaks down and the final chord that goes on for ever.