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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

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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
Friends
Stranger
Dream
Surprise
Live
Fantasy
Nothing
Regret
Agree
Surprises
Habit
Strangers
Completely
Habits
Cutting
Characteristics

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I am burning myself up and will always do so.
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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
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Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
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I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.
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The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
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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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The preservation of friendship is seen as opportunism. You are required to be in one camp or the other. You are enjoined to cut your heartstrings if they extend across the barricade.
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After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
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Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.
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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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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.
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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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