"The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends."
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Quote collection
Jean Cocteau quotes (page 1 of 11)
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"I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul."
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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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"Art is not a pastime but a priesthood."
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"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."
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"The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom."
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"Mirrors should think longer before they reflect."
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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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"Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."
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"Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts."
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"The prettiest dresses are worn to be taken off."
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"If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed."
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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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"Living is a horizontal fall."
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"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."
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"You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
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"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."
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"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."
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"What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies."
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"I have seafoam in my veins, I understand the language of waves."
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