The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
JEAN COCTEAUI love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.
More Jean Cocteau Quotes
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.
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You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.
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The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
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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.
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When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don’t. I have a knack for disturbing.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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Art is science in the flesh.
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Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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The joy of the young is to disobey.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.
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The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.
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The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.
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