Quotes by Jean Cocteau

“A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”

“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?”

“I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world.”

“The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”

“The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living”

“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”

“By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man”

Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

A childs reaction to this type of calamity is twofold and extreme. Not knowing how deeply, powerfully, life drops anchor into its vast sources of recuperation, he is bound to envisage, at once, the very worst; yet at the same time, because of his inability to imagine death, the worst remains totally unreal to him. Gerard went on repeating: Pauls dying; Pauls going to die but he did not believe it. Pauls death would be part of the dream, a dream of snow, of journeying forever.

The poet doesnt invent. He listens.

Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I dont. I have a knack for disturbing.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.

Art is science made clear.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

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