Explore Quotes by Jean Genet

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.

...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.

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 . . .

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

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.

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

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.

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.

I decided to be what crime made of me.

Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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