Jean Genet Quotes

“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.”

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

“Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.”

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

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

“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.”

“But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Betrayal is beautiful.”

“When I got to the street, I walked boldly. But I was always accompanied by an agonizing thought: the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen a cleverer and safer way of stealing.”

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

“The pimp has a grin, never a smile.”

“… beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.”

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

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

“The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.”

“I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.”

“If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!”

“This violence is a calm that disturbs you.”

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.”

“By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.”

“With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.”

“So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.”

“But I would adore that thief who is my mother.”

“Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?”