Wit & Attitude Quote by Jean Cocteau

A good poet commits the one sin polite society can’t forgive: making things up and getting away with it. Cocteau’s line is a dare disguised as a paradox, and it lands because it names the central trick of modern art in one clean insult. The poet is a “liar” not in the moral sense but in the technical one: they fabricate scenes, voices, metaphors, entire emotional weather systems. Yet those inventions can pierce closer to the marrow than a courtroom affidavit ever could.

Cocteau came up in a France rattled by avant-garde revolt and two world wars, when old certainties were shattered and realism felt inadequate. In that context, “truth” isn’t a ledger of facts; it’s the lived accuracy of sensation: grief that has no plot, desire that contradicts itself, the private logic of dreams. Poetry (and Cocteau’s own films and plays) operates like a controlled hallucination, where the surface is false so the feeling can be exact.

The subtext is also defensive, almost punk: stop judging art by journalistic standards. Cocteau is staking a claim for the artist as a necessary counterfeiters of reality, someone who uses artifice to reveal what ordinary language hides or flattens. The line flatters poets, sure, but it also indicts everyone else. If the poet “always speaks the truth,” it implies the rest of us often tell the truth while still lying: with euphemisms, with social scripts, with facts deployed to avoid what’s actually happening.