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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
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Film Director
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Librettist
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Painter
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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
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More quotes by Jean Cocteau
Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.
Jean Cocteau
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Jean Cocteau
Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
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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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.
Jean Cocteau
The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.
Jean Cocteau
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
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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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
Jean Cocteau
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
Since it's now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
Jean Cocteau
I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
Jean Cocteau
What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show.
Jean Cocteau
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Jean Cocteau
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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At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
Jean Cocteau
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau