Jean Genet Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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

Jean Genet
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about 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
I call saintliness not a state but the moral procedure leading to it.

Jean Genet
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
Criminals and police are the most virile emanation of this world.

Jean Genet
Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.

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
The characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.

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

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

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.

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

Jean Genet
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

Jean Genet
Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude

Jean Genet
In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself.

Jean Genet
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

Jean Genet
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.

Jean Genet
They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

Jean Genet