Quotes by Jean Genet

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

“When the judge calls the criminals 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? Its well known some criminals have been great men.”

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

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

“Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadnt had an audience, and lines to speak?”

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

“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.”

“Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a generals sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.”

To write is your last resort when youve betrayed someone.

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

I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.

One can hear all thats going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear whats going on in this house.

Its a true image, born of a false spectacle.

You must now go home, where everything -- you can be quite sure -- will be falser than here....You must go now. Youll leave by the right, through the alley....

We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.

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

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

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

Betrayal is beautiful.

By dint of saying that Im not alive, I accept the fact that people cease to regard me.