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Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

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
First
Work
Cultivate
Hated
Critics
Unique
Makes
Firsts
Everything

More quotes by Jean Cocteau

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The ability to laugh heartily is the sign of a healthy soul.
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Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
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The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
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Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative.
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The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off.
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Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility... It insists on living its own life.
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The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
Jean Cocteau
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Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
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Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
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Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
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The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.
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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
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The artist must know how far to go too far.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
Jean Cocteau
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Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
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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.
Jean Cocteau
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Art is science made flesh.
Jean Cocteau
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The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.
Jean Cocteau
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Keep braiding one's wavelengths back into oneself. That way they gain all the more external power and surround us with a huge affective and protective zone. Don't talk about this. Never talk about our secret methods. If we talk about them, they stop working.
Jean Cocteau