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
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.
It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. It insists on living its own life.
I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.
I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.