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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.

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
Content
Actor
Nobody
Wants
Everybody
Actors
Spectator
Spectators
Paris

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
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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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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.
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The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
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Art is science made flesh.
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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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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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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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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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Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
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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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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
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Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
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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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