Genet Quotes

Some of us are born rebellious. Like Jean Genet or Arthur Rimbaud, I roam these mean streets like a villain, a vagabond, an outcast, scavenging for the scraps that may perchance plummet off humanity's dirty plates, though often sometimes taking a cab to a restaurant is more convenient. (Patti Smith)
Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great. One English critic took me to task for not saying that Genet was "afraid of intimacy" all his life because he'd been abandoned by his mother at the age of seven months. All the evidence needed to make such an interpretation is in my book, but I don't myself draw the vulgar conclusion. Since most literary biographies ignore the work except for potted plot summaries, they strip the biographee of everything redeeming and leave his or her subject to this spiteful revenge, this half-baked Freudian-Christian-bourgeois moralizing. View quote
Edmund White
For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
That is precisely what we should have expected, since Genet wants to live simultaneously creation, destruction, the impossibility of destroying and the impossibility of creating, since he wants both to show his rejection of the divine creation and to manifest, in the absolute, human impotence as man's reproval of God and as the testimony of his grandeur. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
Genet is a man-failure: he wills the impossible in order to derive from the tragic grandeur of this defeat the assurance that there is something other than the possible. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
For Genet, Beauty will be the offensive weapon that will enable him to beat the just on their own ground: that of value. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre