Jean Genet Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Jean Genet

  Dream, Would Be, Youth

  61 Copy quote

• 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

  Reflection, World, Want

  Jean Genet (1960). “The Balcony: (Le Balcon) a Play in Nine Scenes”

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Profound, Solitude, Secret

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

  18 Copy quote

• Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

  Jean Genet

  Art, Point Break, Poetry

  Jean Genet (1994). “Our Lady of the Flowers”, p.125, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  11 Copy quote

• The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

  Jean Genet

  Pimp

  Jean Genet (1994). “The Balcony”, p.26, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  72 Copy quote

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

  Jean Genet

  Dream, Men, Order

  Jean Genet (1994). “Miracle of the Rose”, p.19, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  31 Copy quote

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

  Jean Genet

  Betrayal, Betrayed, Ecstasy

  Jean Genet (2003). “Prisoner of Love”, New York Review of Books

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Solitude, Different

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

  24 Copy quote

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

  Jean Genet

  Born

  Jean Genet (1994). “The Balcony”, p.42, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  8 Copy quote

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

  Jean Genet

  Height, Taste, Harmony

  Jean Genet (1973). “The Thief's Journal”

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Music, Song, Memories

  Jean Genet (2003). “Prisoner of Love”, New York Review of Books

  24 Copy quote

• They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

  Jean Genet

  Grief, Book, Dust

  Jean Genet (2003). “Prisoner of Love”, New York Review of Books

  10 Copy quote

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

  Jean Genet

  Eye, Gay, Lgbt

  24 Copy quote

• The time for reasoning is past; now's the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

  Jean Genet

  Fighting, Past, Mad

  Jean Genet (1960). “The Balcony: (Le Balcon) a Play in Nine Scenes”

  17 Copy quote

• Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.

  Jean Genet

  Running, Adventure, Light

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jean Genet

  Country, Men, White

  12 Copy quote

• 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 general's 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.

  Jean Genet

  Stars, Flower, Order

  Jean Genet (1973). “The Thief's Journal”

  9 Copy quote

• Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

  Jean Genet

  Giving, World, Shapes

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Beautiful, Ugly, Existentialism

  Jean Genet (1987). “Querelle”, p.46, Grove Press

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Hands, Bags

  Jean Genet (1994). “Our Lady of the Flowers”, p.51, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  21 Copy quote

• By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.

  Jean Genet

  Language, Stretching, Wraps

  Jean Genet (1994). “The Blacks: A Clown Show”, p.8, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Artist, Solitude, Moral

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Mind, Elude, Murder

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

  11 Copy quote

• Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

  Jean Genet

  Violence, Calm, Quiet

  Jean Genet, Edmund White (1993). “The selected writings of Jean Genet”, Ecco Pr

  9 Copy quote

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

  Jean Genet

  Men, Revolution, Rebellious

  Jean Genet (2003). “Prisoner of Love”, New York Review of Books

  16 Copy quote

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