Genet Quotes & Sayings

We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible. — 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

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

When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you. — Jean Genet

First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You ... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up ... — Jean Genet

If I have viewed them from a certain angle, it is because, seen from there, that is how they looked
which may be due to prismatic distortion, but which is therefore what they also are, though unaware of being it. — Jean Genet

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

Even there, intimacy evolved its alchemy. A solemn marble stairway led to corridors covered with red carpets, upon which one moved noiselessly. — 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

In the second photo I am thirty years old. My face has hardened. The jaws are accentuated. The mouth is bitter and mean. I look like a hoodlum in spite of my eyes, which have remained gentle. Their gentleness is almost indiscernible because of the fixity of gaze imposed upon me by the official photographer. By means of these two pictures I can see the violence that animated me at the time: from the age of sixteen to thirty. — Jean Genet

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

When I got to the street, I walked boldly. But I was always accompanied by an agonizing thought: the fear that honest people may be thieves who have chosen a cleverer and safer way of stealing. — Jean Genet

But I shall transmit their names far down the ages. These names alone will remain in the future, divested of their objects. Who, it will be asked, were Bulkaen, Harcamone, Divers, who was Pilorge, who was Guy? And their names will inspire awe, as we are awed by the light from a star that has been dead a thousand years. Have I told all there was to tell of this adventure? If I take leave of this book, I take leave of what can be related. The rest is ineffable. I say no more and walk barefoot. — Jean Genet

The Blacks was a white foreigner's idea of a people he did not understand. Genet had superimposed the meanness and cruelty of his own people onto a race he had never known, a race already nearly doubled over carrying the white man's burden of greed and guilt, and which at the same time toted its own insufficiency. I threw the manuscript into a closet, finished with Genet and his narrow little conclusions. Max — Maya Angelou

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. — Jean Genet

In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible but soft hands of birds down stairways which were folded up again as I advanced. I displayed my grief in the friendly fields of death, far from men: within myself. — Jean Genet

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

When I wrote to him, I wanted my letters to be sprightly, trivial, indifferent. In spite of myself, I imbued them with my love. I would have liked to make it seem powerful, sure of itself and sure of me, but I infused it, despite myself, with all my anxiety. — Jean Genet

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak? — Jean Genet

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born. — Jean Genet

I was in the habit of calling a kiss a peck. Bulkaen had said "a smack." As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple ... intimacy ... the secret rites of a deep love. — Jean Genet

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

Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments. — Jean Genet

When a man invents an image that he wants to propagate, that he may even want to substitute for himself, he starts by experimenting, making mistakes, sketching out freaks and other non-viable monsters that he has to tear up unless they disintegrate of their own accord. But the operative image is the one that's left after the person dies or withdraws from the world, as in the case of Socrates, Christ, Saladin, Saint-Just and so on. They succeeded in projecting an image around themselves and into the future. It doesn't matter whether or not the image corresponds to what they were really like: they managed to wrest a powerful image from that reality. — Jean Genet

The force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre. When the anger led to action there was no turgidity or over-emphasis. Anyone who has witnessed political rows among the Whites will have to admit that the Whites aren't overburdened with poetic imagination. — Jean Genet

Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is. — Jean Genet

I decided to be what crime made of me, — Jean Genet

Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the curious product of misfortune, something to which laws could not be applied. I had exceeded the bounds of indecency. — Jean Genet

When the judge calls the criminal's 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? It's well known some criminals have been great men. — Jean Genet

Would it perturb you to see things as they are? To gaze at the world tranquilly and accept responsibility for your gaze, whatever it might see? — Jean Genet

There are authors I truly enjoy to read, like John Irving and Don Delillo and Vollman and Hubert Selby Jr. and Hunter S. Thompson. And then there are writers that, while I enjoy their work, I read as a challenge to myself, to sharpen my knives, like Goethe or Genet or Faulkner or Joyce or Salinger. And I have a terrible weakness for music biographies. They are the best books to take on the road. I don't even have to like the band to enjoy the book. Want a wonderful literary anecdote? And watch your toes, because I'm dropping names like bricks. My favorite book of all time is Among The Dead by Michael Tolkin. Wonderful, dark, funny book. — Sammy Winston

Those eyes, seemingly without mystery, are like certain closed cities, such as Lyons and Zurich, and they hypnotize me as do empty theaters, deserted prisons, machinery at rest, deserts, for deserts are closed and do not communicate with the infinite. — Jean Genet

But," she said to the priest, "I'm not dead yet. I've heard the angels farting on the ceiling. — Jean Genet

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

I don't want to disappear. — Jean Genet

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular. — Lydia Lunch

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing of ecstasy at all. — Jean Genet

The hour between dog and wolf, that is, dusk, when the two can't be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day ... The hour in which ... every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment. — Jean Genet

I, his mistress, mad with grief, shall follow him ... I shall share his glory. You speak of widowhood and deny me the white gown - the mourning of queens. — Jean Genet

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

The coldness surprised him. It entered his vein, and the initiation proceeded. Veils were falling from large and solemn tableaux that Culafroy's eyes could not make out. Alberto took another snake and placed it on Culafroy's bare arm, about which it coiled just as the first had done. "You see, she's harmless." (Alberto always referred to snakes in the feminine.) Just as he felt his penis swelling between his fingers, so the sensitive Alberto felt in the child the mounting emotion that stiffened him and made him shudder. And the insidious friendship for snakes was born. — Jean Genet

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny. — Jean Genet

When the name was in the room, it came to pass that the murderer, abashed, opened up, and there sprang forth, like a Glory, from his pitiable fragments, an altar on which there lay, in the roses, a woman of light and flesh.

The alter undulated on a foul mud into which it sank: the murderer. — Jean Genet

They spent their time doing nothing ... they let intimacy fuse them. — Jean Genet

I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets. — David Bowie

Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat of which imparted to his shoulders a most insolent submissiveness. — Jean Genet

Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces, if our eyes are sharp enough to see them in a flash, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for following the marvelous moment in which it reveals itself, it diminishes in intensity. — Jean Genet

I am his tomb. The earth is nothing. Dead. Staves and orchards issue from my mouth. His. Perfume my chest, which is wide, wide open. A greengage plum swells his silence. The bees escape from his eyes, from his sockets where the liquid pupils have flowed from under the flaccid eyelids. To eat a youngster shot on the barricades, to devour a young hero, is no easy thing. We all love the sun. My mouth is bloody. So are my fingers. I tore the flesh to shreds with my teeth. Corpses do not usually bleed. His did. — Jean Genet

Violence is a calm that disturbs you. — Jean Genet

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

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable. — Jean Genet

He already had one foot in the winter of heaven. He was going to be whisked up. — Jean Genet

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice. — Jean Genet

Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence. — Jean Genet

It's the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go. — Jean Genet

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. — 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 severe and at times almost condemning glance - a glance that seems to pass judgment - with which the homosexual appraises every good-looking young man he may encounter, is in reality a quick but intense meditation on his own loneliness — Jean Genet

In fiction, there happens to be a long history of creative engagement with marginality, with the very human components of society that others don't want to think about, from writers such as Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud to Genet and Sarrazin and right on up to Norman Mailer. — Rachel Kushner

I love you because you're tender and sweet, you the hardest and sternest of men. And your sweetness and tenderness are such that they make you as light as a shred of tulle, subtle as a flake of mist, airy as a caprice. Your thick muscles, your arms, your thighs, your hands, are more unreal than the melting of day into night. You envelop me and I contain you. — 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

The Archangel took his role of fucker seriously. It made him sing the Marseillaise, for now he was proud of being a Frenchman and a Gallic cock, of which only males are proud. Then he died in the war. — Jean Genet

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

For I do not love the oppressed. I love those whom I love, who are always handsome and sometimes oppressed but stand up and rebel — Jean Genet

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

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

She went to get the revolver, which had long since been loaded by a most considerate Providence, and when she held it in her hand, weighty as a phallus in action, she realised she was big with murder, pregnant with a corpse. — Jean Genet

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet's last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn't the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong? — Chris Kraus

A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded. — Jean Genet

It was around this time that I'd begun trying to perfect the art of fucking with people's minds. I'd figured out that when someone else was hogging the limelight, you could cut him down to size by bringing up a subject he didn't know anything about. If the other person knew a lot about literature, I'd talk about the Velvet Underground; if he knew a lot about rock, I'd talk about Messiaen; if he knew a lot about classical music, I'd talk about Roy Lichtenstein; if he knew a lot about pop art, I'd talk about Jean Genet; and so on. Do that in a small provincial city and you never lose an argument. — Ryu Murakami

Genet suggested that colonialism would crumble from the weight of its ignorance, its arrogance and greed, and that the oppressed would take over the positions of their former masters. They would be no better, no more courageous and no more merciful. I — Maya Angelou

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

The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. 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. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them. — Jean Genet

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease. — Jean Genet

For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. — Patti Smith

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a trifle I failed to be, recapturing, so that I may hurl myself into them as into dark pits, those moments when I strayed through the trap-ridden compartments of a subterranean sky — Jean Genet

The characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone. — Jean Genet

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

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

We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning. — Jean Genet

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

The door made the usual, terrifying sound of a door. — 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

Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten. — Jean Genet

I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Negres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness — Frank O'Hara

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell. — Jean Genet

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her. — Jean Genet

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. — Jean Genet

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

Then, upon turning their heads,they realised that they had unwittingly been following a succession of winding paths more complicated than those of a mine. There was no end to Harcamone's interior. It was more decked with black than capital whose king has just been assassinated. A voice from the heart declared: "The interior is grieving," and they swelled with fear, which rose within them like a light wind above the sea. — Jean Genet

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. — Jean Genet

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

They made comments about the women's legs, but, as they were not witty, their remarks had no finesse. Since their emotion was not torn by any point, they quite naturally skidded along on a stagnent ground of poetry. — Jean Genet

Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City. — Patti Smith

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

Faggots are the great immoralists. — Jean Genet

Hell has degrees, so does love — Jean Genet

Divine departed as she would have desired, in a mixture of fantasy and sordidness. — Jean Genet

[Y]ou're in a fog. When you circle round, you watch us live. You watch us struggle and you're envious. — Jean Genet