Jean Genet Quotes

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up.

A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

Faggots are the great immoralists.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

By dint of saying that I'm not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me.

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

Divine was metamorphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls, for a customer murmured a magic word: 'homoseckshual

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man ... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.

The door made the usual, terrifying sound of a door.

We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.

My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.

On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see?

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.

They spent their time doing nothing ... they let intimacy fuse them.

Hell has degrees, so does love

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!

I don't want to disappear.

I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.

One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.

Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.

Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

[Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us struggle and you're envious.

I'm homosexual ... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.

Divine departed as she would have desired, in a mixture of fantasy and sordidness.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.

I decided to be what crime made of me,

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

He did not joke, as the newspapers dared report, for sarcasm is bitter and conceals ferments of despair.

It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

Betrayal is beautiful.

Anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

For I do not love the oppressed. I love those whom I love, who are always handsome and sometimes oppressed but stand up and rebel