Jean Cocteau Quotes

Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.

It is not from choice that my life is music and nothing more, but when one is an artist what else can he be? When a whole lifetime is too short to attain the heights he wants to reach, how then can he devote any of the little time he has to things outside of his art?

Art is a jealous mistress.

I was always an artist. I was a broker to earn a living, but I was always thinking about my art.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

To labor in the arts for any reason other than love is prostitution.

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?

I've never said, 'I live for art.'

An artist is born like a priest is born. If they are born an artist, I would tell them art is not a game: it is something very serious which completely requires everything you have to give.

Art without accomplishment becomes a form of faith, sustained more by the intensity of its common practice than by the pleasure it gives to its adherents in private.

I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children.

I already have a wife who is too much for me.. she is my art, and my works are my children.

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

The person who practices an art is an artist, not a samurai, and one should have the intention of being called a samurai.

It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."

Art class was like a religious ceremony to me. I would wash my hands carefully before touching paper or pencils. The instruments of work were sacred objects to me.

There's obviously always danger in making music or art for art's sake. Even as Christians we can be guilty of that, being more about the art than the Artist who gave us this gift.

I always find it fascinating to ask people, why they've chosen to live their life as an artist? Why be an actor, a singer, an author, a filmmaker? I've heard such inspiring answers to that question.

It is not right for painters to think that painting is like prostitution, that 'first you do it for love, then you do it for others, and finally you do it for money.

A life lived for art, is never a life wasted.

I have never really been a great artist. I have been a human being that has loved art, which is not the same thing. But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.

It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.

I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.

The life of an artist is like the life of a monk, a lewd monk if you like, very Rabelaisian. It is an ordination.

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.