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
All spiritual journeys are martyrdoms
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away.
The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
Find first, seek later.
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.
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
The only way to kill death is through photography.
Respect movements, flee schools.
A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.