"I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead."
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Quote collection
Jean Cocteau quotes (page 6 of 11)
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"Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting."
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"Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing."
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"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."
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"My method is simple: not to bother about poetry. It must come of its own accord. Merely whispering its name drives it away."
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"Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo"
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"Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs."
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"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."
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"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
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"We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves."
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"There are poets and there are grownups."
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"The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition."
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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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"The cinema is death at work."
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"The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction. It is the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality."
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"The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world."
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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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"My little Renoirs. Matisse describes having seen Renoir make these tiny canvases. When he had finished working, he would use up the color left in his brushes on them."
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"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head."
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"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee."
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