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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

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
Ties
Draw
Draws
Poet
Unraveling
Unravel
Handwriting
Poets
Differently

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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
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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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What uniform can I wear to hide my heavy heart? It is too heavy. It will always show. Jacques felt himself growing gloomy again. He was well aware that to live on earth a man must follow its fashions, and hearts were no longer worn.
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The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.
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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!
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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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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.
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See your disappointments as good fortune. One plan's deflation is another's inflation.
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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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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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I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.
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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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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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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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Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
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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.
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