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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.

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
Literature
Produces
Jobs
Effect
Freshness
Light
Clean
Corny
Take
Poet
Spontaneity
Done
Effects
Originally
Youth
Commonplace
Produce
Polish
Rest
Originality

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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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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Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
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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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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.
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The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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The poet never asks for admiration he wants to be believed.
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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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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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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May the devil himself splatter you with dung.
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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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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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Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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