Jean Genet's Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

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

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

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

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.

My illustrious lordship, I'll show you what a woman can do.

As long as I live I will have control over my being.