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

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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 joy of youth is to disobey but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
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The joy of the young is to disobey
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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
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Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.
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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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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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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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I feel myself inhabited by a force or being -- very little known to me. It gives the orders I follow.
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My only politics have been friendship.
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Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble.
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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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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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