Jean Cocteau (1889–1963,) fully Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau, was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist, and critic. His plays are noted for their striking blend of poetry, irony, and fantasy.
Born in Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, Cocteau achieved success early with La Lampe d’Aladin (1909, ‘Aladdin’s Lamp,’) and exploited it. He ran the gamut of experience, first enjoying a spectacular conversion to Roman Catholicism through the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain.
This was followed by a scornful repudiation of Cocteau’s mentor, the use of opium, and a search for salvation through solitude. Nevertheless, he had astonishing success with whatever he touched and figured as a sponsor of Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Giorgio de Chirico, and the group of young French composers known as Les Six. Cocteau’s work was marked by the vivacity and pyrotechnic brilliance as an actor, director, scenario writer, novelist, critic, and artist. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1955.
Significant works are his novels Le Grand Écart (1923; Miscreant, 1925,) Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the Imposter, 1925,) Les Enfants terribles (1929; Children of the Game, 1929,) and plays Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921; The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party, 1963,) Orphée (1926; Orpheus, 1933) and L’Aigle à deux têtes (1946; The Eagle has Two Heads, 1948.) His films include Le Sang d’un poète (1930, The Blood of a Poet,) La Belle et la Bête (1945, Beauty and the Beast,) Orphee (adapted from his play, 1949) and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean Cocteau
I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Angels
What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Style
I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Deception/Lying, Lying, Lies
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Habits, Reality
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Literature, Books
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Defects, The Body
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Art is science made clear.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
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
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
—Jean Cocteau
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Admiration
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
Life is a horizontal fall.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Living, Life
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Music
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Poverty
What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Critics, Criticism
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Cats
The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Obedience
The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Museums
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Youth
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Carpe-diem
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Illusion, Drugs, Alcohol
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Luck
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art, Fashion
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art
When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Originality, Innovation
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Drugs
Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Wealth
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: People, Public
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: Society, Body, Try, Fail, Yin, Honor
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Art
The extreme limit of wisdom—that’s what the public calls madness.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Madness, Mind, Wisdom
To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Manners
Poetry is indispensable—if I only knew what for.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Poets, Poetry
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Dreams
Tact is knowing how far to go too far.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Tact
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
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Dying, Death
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.
—Jean Cocteau
Topics: Men
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