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

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

— Jean Genet

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

— 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

My heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand's in the bag, and the bag is shut, and…

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You … Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it!…

— Jean Genet

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

— Jean Genet

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers…

— Jean Genet

A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people…

— Jean Genet

In reviewing my life, in tracing its course, I fill my cell with the pleasure of being what for want of a…

— Jean Genet

In order to weep, I had descended to the realm of the dead themselves, to their secret chambers, led by the invisible…

— Jean Genet

“The Archangel took his role of fucker seriously. It made him sing the Marseillaise , for now he was proud of being…

— Jean Genet

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both…

— Jean Genet

“It would seem logical to pray to the devil, but no thief would dare do so seriously. To come to terms with…

— Jean Genet

“My love is always sad.”' “That's right. As soon as I kiss you, you get sad. I've noticed it.” “Does it bother…

— Jean Genet

“It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was…

— Jean Genet

“Lucien was walking at my side. The only live things I had ever owned were lovely pricks, their roots buried in black…

— Jean Genet

“I understand what binds the sculptor to his clay, the painter to his colors, each workman to the matter he handles, and…

— Jean Genet

“The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return…

— Jean Genet

“A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was…

— Jean Genet

“In space, she kept devising new and barbaric forms for herself, for she sensed intuitively that immobility makes it too easy for…

— Jean Genet

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we'll…

— Jean Genet

I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take…

— 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…

— Jean Genet

...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when…

— Jean Genet

“Neither the state guards nor the municipal police stopped me. What they saw going by was no longer a man but the…

— Jean Genet

“Ariadne in the labyrinth. The most alive of worlds, human beings with the tenderest flesh, are made of marble. I strew devastation…

— Jean Genet

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so…

— Jean Genet

Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles…

— Jean Genet

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world.…

— Jean Genet

“Beauty has no other origin than a wound, unique, different for each person, hidden or visible, that everyone keeps in himself, that…

— Jean Genet

“Thereafter, he ennobled shame. He bore it in my presence like a burden, like a tiger clinging to his shoulders, the threat…

— Jean Genet

Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself,…

— Jean Genet

“When the name was in the room, it came to pass that the murderer, abashed, opened up, and there sprang forth, like…

— Jean Genet