Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteauwas 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 Beastand 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,...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 July 1889
CityMaisons-Laffitte, France
CountryFrance
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation
The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
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.
Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.
Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.
It is not inspiration; it is expiration.
One is either judge or accused. The judge sits, the accused stands. Live on your feet.
The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.