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

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

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

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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 Quote

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

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.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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 Quote

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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

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.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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

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

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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 Quote

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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 Quote

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

Tact consists in knowing how far to go too far.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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 Quote

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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

The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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

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

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

Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.
- Jean Cocteau Quote

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