Jean Cocteau

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

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

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

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

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.

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

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

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

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.

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

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.

Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.

The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.

If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.