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It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

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
Noticed
Required
Cease
Exist
Seems
Invisibility
Ceases
Provision
Elegance

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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.
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I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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Art is science made flesh.
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Inspiration arrived as a result of profound indolence... I awoke with a start and witnessed as from a seat in a theatre, three acts of a potentially awesome play.
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Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
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The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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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 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.
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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
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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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Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.
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Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
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Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.
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Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.
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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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