Jean Cocteau (1889 - 1963) French poet, novelist, painter, filmaker

• "Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

• "The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."

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

• "The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders."

• "I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."

• "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."

• "Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."

• "One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."

• "I am a lie who always speaks the truth."

• "Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture."
  • Also: "An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."

• "A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

• "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo."

• "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"

• "Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."

• "What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."

• "When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."

• "You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."

• "A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."

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

• "The trouble about the Academie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed."

• "The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."

• "There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."

• "There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say 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."

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

• "All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."

• "An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."

• "Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying."