Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (1889–1963) was 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 Beast and 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, and Raymond Radiguet.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean Cocteau
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art, Artists
Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Past and Present
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Yin, Society, Try, Honor
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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.
—Jean Cocteau
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Adversity
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
—Jean Cocteau
Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Poets, Poetry
You have comfort.
—Jean Cocteau
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Victor Hugo French Novelist
Michel Houellebecq French Author
Remy de Gourmont French Poet
Guillaume Apollinaire Italian-born French Poet
Anatole France French Novelist
Jules Renard French Author, Diarist
Gustave Flaubert French Novelist
Guy de Maupassant French Short-story Writer
Voltaire French Philosopher, Author
Arthur Rimbaud French Poet