Explore Quotes by Jean Genet

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

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.

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

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

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.

Betrayal is beautiful.

It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

One can hear all that's going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what's going on in this house.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

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

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

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

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.

Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.