Jean Cocteau Quotes

[C]ourageous film-makers, who take no account of success, prove that cinematography is a medium for realism and lyricism, and that everything depends on the angle from which one observes the spectacle of life — the angle from which they constrain us to share a singular vision of things and emphasize the everyday miracle that lies within them.

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

Many years ago, as I was glancing through a catalogue of jokes for parties and weddings, I saw an item, 'An object difficult to pick up'. I haven't the slightest idea what that 'object' is or what it looks like, but I like knowing that it exists and I like thinking about it.
A work of art should also be 'an object difficult to pick up'. It must protect itself from vulgar pawing, which tarnishes and disfigures it. It should be made of such a shape that people don't know which way to hold it, which embarrasses and irritates the critics, incites them to be rude, but keeps it fresh. The less it's understood, the slower it opens its petals, the later it will fade. A work of art must make contact, be it even through a misunderstanding, but at the same time it must hide its riches, to reveal them little by little over a long period of time. A work that doesn't keep its secrets and surrenders itself too soon exposes itself to the risk of withering away, leaving only a dead stalk.

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

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Il y a dans le dessin une très grande jouissance. L'écriture, c'est le dessin noué autrement. (...) Et quand je dessine, j'écris, et, peut-être, que quand j'ecris, je dessine.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

« Un beau livre, c'est celui qui sème à foison les points d'interrogation. »

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

Each day in the mirror I watch death at work.

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

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

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

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.

Paris, however — because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements — Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.