Jean Genet Quotes (24 Quotes)

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

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent.

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.

We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent -- or they themselves -- was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.

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

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

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.

The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

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

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.

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

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

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning my exile.

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.

When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow It's well known some criminals have been great men.

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

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

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

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

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

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