Jean Cocteau Quotes - Page 6

The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.

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.

People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.

It was the East that should have sent us missionaries.

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

Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.

The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.

The artist must know how far to go too far.

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.

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.

The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.

History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.

There are poets and there are grownups.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

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

The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.

Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.

Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.

Artists can no more speak about their work, than plants can speak about horticulture.

One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.

Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.

I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.