Jean Cocteau

Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.

I am a lie that always speaks the truth.

Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir un peu plus avant de renvoyer les images.

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.

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.

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

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

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

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

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Writing is an act of love. If it is not it is only handwriting. It consists in obeying the driving force of plants and trees and in broadcasting sperm far around us.

The richness of the world is in its wastefulness.

La mode, c'est ce qui se démode.