Jean Genet Quotes
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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.
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.
Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.
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.
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.
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.
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.
Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.
