The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Cocteau suggests that the deepest payoff of making art is neither public recognition nor measurable achievement, but a private, addictive exhilaration—the altered state of absorption, risk, and heightened perception that creation can induce. By calling it “intoxication,” he frames artistic practice as a kind of self-administered ecstasy that can persist even when external rewards are absent. The sting of the second clause is moral and psychological: “bad artists” may continue not out of vocation or excellence, but because the act of producing—however mediocre the result—still supplies the pleasurable rush of feeling like an artist. The remark critiques vanity and compulsion while acknowledging the genuine lure of the creative process.