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

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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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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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
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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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You are always concentrated on the inner thing. The moment one becomes aware of the crowd, performs for the crowd, it is spectacle.
Jean Cocteau
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The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
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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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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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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
Jean Cocteau
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
Jean Cocteau
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Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
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Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
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Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!
Jean Cocteau
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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
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I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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