Jean Genet Quotes
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A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
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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.
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The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
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By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.
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So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility.
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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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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.
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I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.
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The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.
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I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.
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Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.
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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.
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I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
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Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
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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.
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Violence is a calm that disturbs you.
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If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!
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The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
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To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
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I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty - a sunken beauty.
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Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?
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Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.
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Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
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With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.