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
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
Do not fear being ridiculous in relation to the ridiculous.
Do not take up cause against the inaccuracies printed about you. They are your protection.
Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.
Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.
A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.
Vivre est une chute horizontale. Life is a horizontal fall.
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
I shall never forget what I saw at the Museum of Modern Art: in a spotless schoolroom, fifty little girls painting away at tables covered with brushes, pots, tubes, bowls, staring into space and sticking out their tongues like the clever animals that ring a bell, tongues lolling and eyes vague. Teachers supervise these young creators of abstract art and slap their wrists if what they paint represents something and dangerously inclines toward realism. The mothers - still at the Picasso stage - are not admitted.