Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteauwas a French writer, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Cocteau is best known for his novel Les Enfants Terribles, and the films Blood of a Poet, Les Parents Terribles, Beauty and the Beastand Orpheus. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, Albert Gleizes, Igor Stravinsky, Marie Laurencin, María Félix, Édith Piaf, Panama Al Brown, Colette, Jean Genet,...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 July 1889
CityMaisons-Laffitte, France
CountryFrance
In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.
Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
Without resistance you can do nothing
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.
Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless...
The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.