Quotes by Jean Cocteau

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

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to ones preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

The extreme limit of wisdom, thats what the public calls madness.

Life is a horizontal fall.

The poet doesnt invent. He listens.

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

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

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

“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.”

“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!”

“The poet doesnt invent. He listens. ”