Jean Cocteau Quotes

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

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.

I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

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

Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.

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

My hair has always grown in all directions and my teeth too and my beard. My nerves and my soul must surely grow in the same way. That is what makes me incomprehensible to those who grow all in one direction and are incapable of imagining a hay-stack. It is this that baffles those who could rid me of this legendary leprosy. They do not know how to take me.
This organic disorder is a safeguard for me because it keeps the thoughtless at distance. I also get certain advantages from it. It gives me diversity, contrast, a quickness in leaning to one side or the other as this or that object invites me, and in regaining my balance.

Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.

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.

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

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

Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.

One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.

Si je préfère les chats aux chiens, c'est parce qu'il n'y a pas de chat policier

All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms