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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.

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
Long
Like
Journal
Letter
Receiving
Letters
Writer
Reading
Death

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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The cinema is death at work.
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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
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Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
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You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
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Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
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Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.
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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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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
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What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
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