Jean Cocteau Quotes

I've achieved what every artist wants, which is that some of their work will outlive them.

If somebody wants to sing my songs after I'm gone, nobody will be happier than my dead body.

Everything seems to be going faster and faster. It's really harder to create something that endures. The New York City Ballet has succeeded in doing that.

Audiences aren't going to get rid of me. One thing I can say, with absolute certainty, is that my shows will still be performed when I'm dead, buried and forgotten. They're going to absolutely outlive me, which is a wonderful thing to think about.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

All the buzz can be very much here today and gone tomorrow, but my focus is creating music that will last forever.

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton."

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

Films and gramophone records, music, books and buildings show clearly how vigorously a man's life and work go on after his 'death,' whether we feel it or not, whether we are aware of the individual names or not. There is no such thing as death according to our view!

What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don't have, because our work is lasting; it's there forever to view.

Age makes all things greater after their death; a name comes to the tongue easier from the grave.

Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives.

I don't give a toss about being remembered after my death.

The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I'm working on. And I think that's going to make me last longer than me.

In this world of doubt, one thing is certain for me; that I will go on writing songs up to and - I hope, through heavenly means or diabolical - beyond the day I die.

If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.

I've spent a lot of words on my own mortality.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

If fame is to come only after death, I am in no hurry for it.

I do not choose that my grave should be dug while I am still alive.

Men's fame is like their hair, which grows after they are dead, and with just as little use to them.

Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.

I want to create a body of work that is entertaining and speaks to people for a long time. Longer than my life span.

I think that's what really a substantial work is, it's forever. It's the truth now and it was the truth then, and it will be the truth tomorrow.