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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.
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
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Critics
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Cultivate
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More quotes by Jean Cocteau
The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
Jean Cocteau
Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
Jean Cocteau
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
Jean Cocteau
To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
Jean Cocteau
Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
Jean Cocteau
The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.
Jean Cocteau
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 poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.
Jean Cocteau
Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
Jean Cocteau
The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.
Jean Cocteau
The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
Jean Cocteau
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
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.
Jean Cocteau
The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
Jean Cocteau
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
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
Jean Cocteau