Jean Genet
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.Collection: History
Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.Collection: Dreams
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.Collection: Beauty
Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
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.
I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
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.
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 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.
I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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.Collection: Reflection
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.Collection: Pimp
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.Collection: Profound
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.Collection: Art
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 solitudeCollection: Men
It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.Collection: Born
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.Collection: Grief
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 within me.Collection: Music
I'm homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mind
Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.Collection: Running
By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.Collection: Language
Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.Collection: Blessed
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.Collection: Giving
Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.Collection: Artist
My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.Collection: Heart
The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Flower
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.Collection: Saint
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.Collection: Men
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.Collection: Men
I don't want to disappear.Collection: Want
on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.Collection: Song
I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.Collection: Ideas
She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Imagination
Betrayal is beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Cheating
...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.Collection: Book
I decided to be what crime made of me.Collection: Crime
First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.Collection: Rags