Quotes from Jean Genet

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

Betrayal is beautiful.

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

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.

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

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

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

My heart to my mother, my cock to the whores, my head to the hangman.

I leave you free to imagine any dialogue you please. Choose whatever may charm you. Have it, if you like, that they hear the voice of the blood, or that they fall in love at first sight... Conceive the wildest improbabilities. Have it that the depths of their beings are thrilled at accosting each other in slang. Tangle them suddenly in a swift embrace or a brotherly kiss. Do whatever you like.

When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you.

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot -- the sail he has seen.

on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

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

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.

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

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

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.