Jean Genet Quotes

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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.

~ Jean Genet

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

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

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

~ Jean Genet

Betrayal is beautiful.

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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.

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet

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

~ Jean Genet