Quotes from Jean Cocteau

El poeta es un mentiroso que siempre dice la verdad.

There is neither magic nor master's eye. Only a great deal of love and a great deal of work.

The knack is art.

Delicious was not a term applicable to anything below the crust of that volcano, whose heady vapors numbed his ravished senses.

That is what's important. The life of the line. When I draw, it's like tied and untied writing. My lines can be vivid or dead. The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive. A line is in danger of dying all along. My method of drawing is very much like jazz improvisation. I improvise with the lines and the colors. (...) There's great joy in drawing. Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing. And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw.

I have come to realize that the rhythm of the film is one of narrative. I am telling the story. It is as if I were hidden behind the screen, saying: Then such and such a thing happened. The characters don't seem to be living a life of their own, but a life that is being narrated. Perhaps that's how it should be in a fairy tale.

Never, shrieked Paul, would he consent to meet the "filthy Jew": he was coming along tomorrow at the appointed hour to slap his face.

His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]

Si je préfère les chats aux chiens, c'est parce qu'il n'y a pas de chat policier

I would like to be able to convey to you the sound of dead voices, to break open this unbearable tomb of sound, to wrest something more than silhouettes from vanished years and by some unimaginable trick let you hear the ha-ha-ha with which Catulle Mendès accompanied the slightest sentence, the muffled voice of Edmond Rostand or the laughter which Proust smeared over his face with his white-gloved hand and his beard.

Fashion is everything that goes out of fashion.

Ce qui caractérise notre époque, c'est la crainte d'avoir l'air bête en décernant une louange, et la certitude d'avoir l'air intelligent en décernant un blâme. »

Success had put me on the wrong track and I did not know that there is a kind of success worse than failure, and a kind of failure worth all the success in the world. Neither did I know that the distant friendship of Rainer Maria Rilke would one day console me for having seen his lamp burn without knowing that it was signalling me to go and singe my wings against its flame.

Je sais que la poésie est indispensable, mais je ne sais pas à quoi.

plant it It will sprout But forget about the rustic festivities For the explosive word falls harmlessly eternal through the compact generations

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

La décadence est la grande minute où une civilisation devient exquise.

Regarde, spectateur, remontée à bloc, de telle sorte que le ressort se déroule avec lenteur tout le long d'une vie humaine, une des plus parfaites machines construites par les dieux infernaux pour l'anéantissement mathématique d'un mortel.

I am neither cheerful nor sad. But i can be completely the one or completely the other to excess.

Il y a une parte de vérité qui sort de nous que ce n'est pas le rêve, ce n'est pas la rêverie. .... C'est notre vrai moi, il est caché dans les ténèbres, il nous donne désordre....nous voulons travailler sans lui et est alors que nous commettons nos plus graves erreurs.

I kept nothing of myself but the ashes.

Cet amour le ravageait d'autant plus qu'il précédait la connaissance de l'amour. C'était un mal vague, intense, contre lequel il n'existe aucun remède, un désir chaste sans sexe et sans but.

Invoqué ou non invoqué, Le divin sera présent.

I have always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truths which eventually turn into lies. Mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths.