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Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Jean Cocteau

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Jean Cocteau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1889
Born: July 5
Died: 1963
Died: October 11
Actor
Composer
Designer
Film Director
Illustrator
Librettist
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
Prosaist
Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Inspirational
Art
Produces
Beautiful
Frequently
Hands
Ugly
Become
Produce
Always
Design
Things
Fashion
Time
Hand

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A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
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My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them.
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And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
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Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
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True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
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The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed) but I expect a black silence from them that is almost as violent: as laughter.
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My only politics have been friendship.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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The joy of the young is to disobey
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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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