Quotes by Jean Cocteau
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
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.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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.
Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Don't for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels.
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.
Life is a horizontal fall.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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.
There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.
There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
