The line is Jean Cocteau’s. In a 1951 radio conversation with André Fraigneau — printed in Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau — he was asked which object he would carry out if his house were on fire, and answered “Je crois que j’emporterais le feu.” Paulo Coelho did publish the anecdote, on his blog in 2007, but he named Cocteau inside it; the credit only slid onto Coelho once the retelling was clipped away from its frame.
“If your house was burning and you could only take one thing with you, what would it be? I would take the fire” Jean Cocteau — not Paulo Coelho. Asked in a 1951 radio conversation with André Fraigneau which object he would carry out of a burning house, Cocteau answered "Je crois que j'emporterais le feu" — printed in Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau (Paris: U.G.E./10-18, 1965; Éditions du Rocher, 1988). Paulo Coelho retold the anecdote on his blog in 2007 and credited Cocteau by name. Chronology: Quote Investigator, 16 February 2018. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “I would take the fire.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Paulo Coelho. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The 1951 radio conversation
Spoken by
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)
Occasion
Radio conversations with André Fraigneau, 1951
Published in
Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau
Translation
No credited translator; English forms in print from 1967
S’il y avait le feu chez vous, quel est l’objet que vous préféreriez et que vous emporteriez? — Je crois que j’emporterais le feu.
Radio, 1951
The question is André Fraigneau’s; the answer is Cocteau’s. Quote Investigator quotes this exchange from the 1988 Éditions du Rocher edition of the Entretiens, the transcript of conversations recorded for radio in 1951.
1951 — the broadcast. André Fraigneau interviews Cocteau in fourteen programmes of fifteen to twenty minutes, broadcast twice weekly on France’s Chaîne nationale between 26 March and 14 May. Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier’s Cocteau resource ↗
1965, then 1988 — into print. The transcripts appear as Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau from U.G.E. in the “10/18” series, and are reprinted by Éditions du Rocher in 1988 — 173 pages, ISBN 978-2-268-00734-2. Catalogue record for the 1988 edition ↗
1967 and 1971 — into English. A Christian Science Monitor review of Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being reports the exchange and gives the reply as “I’d take the fire”; a 1971 New York Times review of Harold Acton’s Memoirs of an Aesthete 1939–1969 reprints it in the same form. Both citations at Quote Investigator ↗
2007 — the fork. Paulo Coelho publishes the anecdote on his blog, crediting Cocteau; from there the story circulates widely enough that the name on it starts changing. “What would you save?” ↗
This is a modern line, not an old one. Cocteau spoke it in 1951 and it was first published in Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau in 1965, with a 1988 reprint from Éditions du Rocher — all well after the 1931 US public-domain cutoff, and Cocteau died in 1963, so the French text remains under his estate’s control. The English wordings in circulation are uncredited translations of that copyrighted text and carry no separate public-domain status.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Where the credit went wrong
This is an unusually clean case of a quote drifting: the man it is now pinned on published it himself, with the right name attached, and the name fell off in transit.
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Most common todayPaulo Coelho Retold it, did not write it
In a 2007 post titled “What would you save?” Coelho recounts a journalist asking Cocteau, “If this house were to catch fire right now and you could take only one thing with you, what would you choose?” and Cocteau replying, “I would take the fire.” Coelho names Cocteau explicitly, telling the story to fellow guests at a castle where he was staying — one of them, Álvaro Teixeira, an expert on Cocteau’s life, is the one who asks him what the reply was. Read the post ↗
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The question halfAndré Fraigneau, not Cocteau Interviewer’s words
The burning-house setup that people quote as part of the line is the interviewer’s. In the transcript it reads “S’il y avait le feu chez vous, quel est l’objet que vous préféreriez et que vous emporteriez?” Only the answer belongs to Cocteau. Quote Investigator prints the exchange ↗
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The wordingThe English sentence Translated, and flattened
Cocteau answered in French, and hedged: “Je crois que j’emporterais le feu.” No single translator owns the English. The clipped forms enter print later — “I’d take the fire” in a 1967 Christian Science Monitor review, “I would take the fire” in The New York Times in 1988. See the chronology ↗
✓The answer is Jean Cocteau’s, given to André Fraigneau in 1951 and printed in Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau. Quote Investigator documents every step of its journey ↗ — including Coelho’s retelling, which got the attribution right.
Context
Why the answer sticks
The reply works on two levels at once, which is why it travels. Take the fire and there is no burning house left to grieve over — the rescue is total, and the cruel arithmetic of “only one thing” is broken open rather than solved. Take the fire and you have also taken the one possession Cocteau seems to have rated above the paintings and the books: the thing that made them worth having.
In Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, excerpted in The New York Times in 1988, Paul Monette set both readings side by side, citing the composer Ned Rorem’s account of the remark: “There’s something in there about the fire of inspiration, but I choose to see it the other way, carrying out the fire to spare the house.” as quoted by Quote Investigator ↗
Je crois que j’emporterais le feu.
Two things the English version loses
The hedge. Cocteau did not declare; he tried a thought out. The transcript reads “Je crois que j’emporterais le feu” — I think I would carry away the fire. Every English form in circulation, from “I’d take the fire” in 1967 to “I would take the fire” in 1988, drops that hesitation and turns a remark into a slogan. Quote Investigator prints the French and both English forms ↗
The question is not his. Half of what people quote — the burning-house setup — belongs to the interviewer, André Fraigneau. Only the answer is Cocteau’s. It is also worth noting where the line is not: Wikiquote’s Cocteau page ↗ carries dozens of his epigrams and does not include this one. The chronology that pins it down was assembled by Quote Investigator, working from a copy of the 1988 Entretiens consulted in Paris.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
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.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Jean Cocteau and André Fraigneau, Entretiens: Jean Cocteau et André Fraigneau (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1988; first published Paris: U.G.E., “10/18,” 1965), transcribing radio conversations recorded in 1951. English forms as printed in The Christian Science Monitor, 1967 (“I’d take the fire”) and The New York Times, 1988 (“I would take the fire”). Chronology per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: I Would Carry Away the Fire,” February 16, 2018.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If your house was burning and you could only take one thing with you, what would it be? I would take the fire’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-your-house-was-burning-and-you-could-only-take-one-thing/