Jean Cocteau Quotes

When you're in hell, you forget how great you really are because you're suffering and you forget the great things you've done.

I've been hit in the head a lot, but I don't think I have any problems, but I can't, for the life of me, remember a lot of my road stories and good times. When times are bad enough, that's all you can ever think about.

There are sufferings that have lost their memory and do not remember why they are suffering.

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Art comes from joy and pain...But mostly from pain.

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

You don't know what's coming for you in life, and you don't know what's around the corner. When you're in a great deal of pain, you're only imagining your world the way it is.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

Memories are worse than bullets.

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her person for the worse.

All houses in which men have lived and suffered and died are haunted houses.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

You can't argue with someone who believes, or just passionately suspects, that the poet's function is not to write what he must write but, rather, to write what he would write if his life depended on his taking responsibility for writing what he must in a style designed to shut out as few of his old librarians as humanly possible.

Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.

I think the most important thing to remember is that pain passes. And artistically, the pain is going to pass. It's what you want to express out of the pain as opposed to indulging in the agony-and-pain mantra of songwriting that became such a hit in the '90s and still, all the way up to now.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

Madness strips you of memory and leaves you scrabbling around on the floor of your brain for the snatches and snippets of what happened, what was said, and when.

The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.

The fallacy is that you have to hold some sort of stake in the grief or horror in order to write about it - I think the opposite is true.

How well I would write if I were not here!