Jean Cocteau Quotes

Quotations from Cocteau's writings, mostly from "Professional Secrets."

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Living is a horizontal fall.

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Now Keats knew that poets do not lie. They testify. And Keats knew that people imagine poets lie.

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...at the Auberge du Clou. Mallarmé came in to buy some snails. Verlaine was drinking at a table. They did not know each other. They spoke.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

The fact is, the poet does not want admiration, he wants to be believed.

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"A little too much," he answers, "is just enough for me." If I were to adopt a motto, I should choose this magnificent reply.

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[The cricket] sleeps on top of the thermos bottle and plays ravishingly on a long green guitar attached to his body.

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You must learn that a good book never gives what you are entitled to expect of it....It must riddle you with question marks.

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Suffering never made anybody beautiful.

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I never work enough. work keeps me from feeling tired. It is afterward that I fall into a black hole.

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This structure which one erects neither in the present nor in the past nor in the future: a film.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

[The cricket] sleeps on top of the thermos bottle and plays ravishingly on a long green guitar attached to his body.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

...at the Auberge du Clou. Mallarmé came in to buy some snails. Verlaine was drinking at a table. They did not know each other. They spoke.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

Freely, joyously, boldly, Matisse painted pictures which make life an appetite.

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Everything is monstrous in art...

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In Le Sang d'un Poète, I tried to film poetry, as the Williamson brothers film the ocean floor.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

Living is a horizontal fall.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

To resort to dreaming is not to leave the house; it is to explore the attic, where our childhood made contact with poetry.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

Now Keats knew that poets do not lie. They testify. And Keats knew that people imagine poets lie.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

Moreover, I leave to poets the responsibility of comparisons, of images.

[Jean Cocteau Quotes @CocteauQuotes]

Freely, joyously, boldly, Matisse painted pictures which make life an appetite.