Love Quote by Jean Cocteau

Cocteau is doing a sly reversal: the problem isn’t that fictional figures are “wooden,” it’s that so many real people are. In one sentence he smuggles a whole theory of art and personality: when daily life feels automated, performative, or emotionally underdeveloped, the supposedly inert characters onstage or onscreen can register as more alive than the audience watching them.

The wordplay matters. “Souls of wood” sounds like a fairy tale curse, but it’s also a jab at bourgeois self-protection: a cultivated hardness that passes for maturity. Then he pivots to “wooden characters who do indeed have a soul,” rescuing the much-mocked “wooden” performance or archetype as something else entirely - a deliberate stylization that can carry genuine feeling. Cocteau, a director steeped in theater, poetry, and cinematic illusion, understood that realism isn’t the only route to truth; sometimes truth arrives through the mask, the puppet, the constraint.

The subtext is almost tender in its contempt. If you’ve been surrounded by people who speak in scripts, who confuse surface polish with inner life, you’ll fall hard for a character whose “woodenness” is merely material - a carved form animated by desire, contradiction, and vulnerability. Cocteau also quietly defends artifice itself: the crafted, the theatrical, the obviously made. His line implies that soul is not a natural resource evenly distributed by biology; it’s something revealed - or withheld - by style, attention, and courage.