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To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.

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
Audacious
Tact
Manners
Point

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I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
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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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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
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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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Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
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Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends.
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Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
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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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History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
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Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo
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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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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.
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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.
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The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
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There's no such thing as love only proof of love.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
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Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
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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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