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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
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Painter
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Poet
Postage Stamp Designer
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Clément Eugène Jean Pierre Cocteau
Zhan Kokto
Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau
Eugene Jean Maurice Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
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More quotes by Jean Cocteau
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Jean Cocteau
A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.
Jean Cocteau
One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
Jean Cocteau
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.
Jean Cocteau
There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
Jean Cocteau
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
Jean Cocteau
The poet never asks for admiration he wants to be believed.
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
The artist must know how far to go too far.
Jean Cocteau
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Jean Cocteau
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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!
Jean Cocteau
We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples one speaks of thieves.
Jean Cocteau
Stupidity is always astounding, no matter how often one encounters it.
Jean Cocteau