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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.
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
Something
Toward
Occurs
Love
Moving
Racing
Life
Death
Smoke
Stills
Express
Doe
Oneself
Still
Train
Everything
Concern
Even
Drug
Opium
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
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We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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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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French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
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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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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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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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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.
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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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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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