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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

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
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Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Poetry
Doesn
Listens
Invent
Poetic
Invention
Poet

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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
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Art is science made flesh.
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.
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The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
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History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
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In exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.
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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.
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Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
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Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
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And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.
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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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Enough of clouds, waves, aquariums, water-sprites and nocturnal scents what we need is music of the earth, everyday music..music one can live in like a house.
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
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