Quotes from Jean Genet

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

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

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

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.

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

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

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.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

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

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

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.