Quotes by Jean Cocteau

"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."

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

"Art is not a pastime but a priesthood."

"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."

"Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."

"Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail."

"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth."

"The poet doesn't invent. He listens."

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Of course I believe in luck. How otherwise to explain the success of some people you detest?"

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."

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