328 Quotes by Jean Cocteau

Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.

Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.

Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.

The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.

The artist must know how far to go too far.

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.