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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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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
What is style? For many people, a very complicated way of saying very simple things. According to us, a very simple way of saying very complicated things.
Jean Cocteau
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
Jean Cocteau
Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
Jean Cocteau
I love cats because I enjoy my home and little by little, they become its visible soul.
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
I am burning myself up and will always do so.
Jean Cocteau
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Jean Cocteau
The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.
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
I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.
Jean Cocteau
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Jean Cocteau
Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.
Jean Cocteau
The skin of all of us is responsive to gypsy songs and military marches.
Jean Cocteau
