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
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
There are poets and there are grownups.
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
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.
Art is science in the flesh.
Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.
I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition.
Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.
Everyone's pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.
I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.