Quotes By Jean Cocteau

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

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

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to 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.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

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

Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

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

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Life is a horizontal fall.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

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

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