1889–1963 · French poet, playwright, novelist and filmmaker
Jean Cocteau worked in nearly every art form twentieth-century France had to offer — the novel Les Enfants terribles (1929), the plays La Voix humaine (1930) and Les Parents terribles (1938), and the films Le Sang d’un poète (1930), La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Orphée (1950) — while insisting that all of it was poetry by other means. He was also an inveterate maker of epigrams, delivered fast and in public, which is exactly the kind of output that detaches from its author and goes wandering. Several of the lines most often quoted as Cocteau’s are not his, and this one — genuinely his — now circulates most widely under somebody else’s name.