Jean Cocteau

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.

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 instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

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.

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

Life is a horizontal fall.

I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.