Jean Genet quotes

This violence is a calm that disturbs you. (Jean Genet)
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all.
Jean Genet
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
Jean Genet
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
Jean Genet
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
Jean Genet
But I would adore that thief who is my mother.
Jean Genet
Betrayal is beautiful.
Jean Genet
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
Jean Genet
... beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
Jean Genet
It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
Jean Genet
The pimp has a grin, never a smile. (Jean Genet)
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.
Jean Genet
Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!
Jean Genet
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.
Jean Genet
The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.
Jean Genet
I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.
Jean Genet
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.
Jean Genet
If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!
Jean Genet
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.
Jean Genet
By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste. (Jean Genet)
With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.
Jean Genet
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.
Jean Genet
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?
Jean Genet
Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.
Jean Genet