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
The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.
The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.
The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.
Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation
The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.