Top 80 Jean Genet Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Jean Genet

2. “Betrayal is beautiful.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

4. “By stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.”

— Jean Genet

5. “I don’t want to disappear.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

7. “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.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

9. “It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.”

— Jean Genet

10. “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.”

— Jean Genet

11. “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 solitude.”

— Jean Genet

12. “It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.”

— Jean Genet

13. “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.”

— Jean Genet

14. “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.”

— Jean Genet

15. “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.”

— Jean Genet

16. “The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

18. “Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.”

— Jean Genet

19. “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.”

— Jean Genet

20. “Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

23. “Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!”

— Jean Genet

24. “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.”

— Jean Genet

25. “The pimp has a grin, never a smile.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

27. “We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.”

— Jean Genet

28. “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.”

— Jean Genet

29. “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.”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

31. “I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.”

— Jean Genet

32. “Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that he preserves and to which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but profound solitude.”

— Jean Genet

33. “Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly.”

— Jean Genet

34. “I love you because you’re tender and sweet, you the hardest and sternest of men. And your sweetness and tenderness are such that they make you as light as a shred of tulle, subtle as a flake of mist, airy as a caprice. Your thick muscles, your arms, your thighs, your hands, are more unreal than the melting of day into night. You envelop me and I contain you.”

— Jean Genet

35. “Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?”

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

37. “There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.”

— Jean Genet

38. “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.”

— Jean Genet

39. “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.”

— Jean Genet

40. “But,” she said to the priest, “I’m not dead yet. I’ve heard the angels farting on the ceiling.”

— Jean Genet

41. “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.”

— Jean Genet

42. “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.”

— Jean Genet

43. “Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat of which imparted to his shoulders a most insolent submissiveness.”

— Jean Genet

44. “In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself.”

— Jean Genet

45. “I, his mistress, mad with grief, shall follow him... I shall share his glory. You speak of widowhood and deny me the white gown – the mourning of queens.”

— Jean Genet

46. “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.”

— Jean Genet

47. “Violence is a calm that disturbs you.”

— Jean Genet

48. “In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty.”

— Jean Genet

49. “Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency.”

— Jean Genet

50. “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.”

— Jean Genet