Jean Cocteau Quotes

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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.

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.

Regarde, spectateur, remontée à bloc, de telle sorte que le ressort se déroule avec lenteur tout le long d'une vie humaine, une des plus parfaites machines construites par les dieux infernaux pour l'anéantissement mathématique d'un mortel.

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

The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed.

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

That is what's important. The life of the line. When I draw, it's like tied and untied writing. My lines can be vivid or dead. The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive. A line is in danger of dying all along.

My method of drawing is very much like jazz improvisation. I improvise with the lines and the colors. (...)
There's great joy in drawing. Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing. And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw.

He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.

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

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

It is, it seems, a social crime to desire solitude.

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