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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.

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
Cannot
Visibility
Life
Insists
Elegance
Poetry
Achieve
Hope
Living

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In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor nobody is content to be a spectator.
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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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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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I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
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Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.
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True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.
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At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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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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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.
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One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
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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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Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
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