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

This violence is a calm that disturbs you.

— Jean Genet

But I would adore that thief who is my mother.

— Jean Genet

If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!

— Jean Genet

I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face.

— Jean Genet

By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.

— Jean Genet

Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life.

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?

— Jean Genet

But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil.

— Jean Genet

With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable.

— Jean Genet

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me.

— Jean Genet

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.

— Jean Genet

The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side.

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet