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The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.
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
Escape
Prison
Works
Artist
Art
Kind
More quotes by Jean Cocteau
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.
Jean Cocteau
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
Jean Cocteau
Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.
Jean Cocteau
Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.
Jean Cocteau
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
Jean Cocteau
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
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.
Jean Cocteau
To be audacious with tact, you have to know to what point you can go too far.
Jean Cocteau
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
My only politics have been friendship.
Jean Cocteau
The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails.
Jean Cocteau
Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.
Jean Cocteau
The Louvre is a morgue you go there to identify your friends.
Jean Cocteau
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
Jean Cocteau
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
All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
Jean Cocteau
Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.
Jean Cocteau
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
Jean Cocteau
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
Jean Cocteau
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Jean Cocteau
