Jean Genet Quotes

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

  Jean Genet

  Topics in Uncategorized

• In today’s cities, the only place—unfortunately on the outskirts—to construct a theatre is a cemetery.

  Jean Genet

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Hatred is what we need. Ideas are born from hatred.

  Jean Genet

  Topics in Uncategorized

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• It is not up to the artist or to the poet to find practical solutions to the problems of evil.

  Jean Genet

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Jean Cocteau thinks that I am a poor thief. That’s because next to him I am primarily a writer. Thieves think that I am a poor writer.

  Jean Genet

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Jean Genet

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Righteousness

• Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?

  Jean Genet

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

  Jean Genet

• What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

  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

• Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

  Jean Genet

• The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.

  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

• 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

• 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.

  Jean Genet

• I’m homos*xual… How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

  Jean Genet

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

  Jean Genet

• I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

  Jean Genet

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

  Jean Genet

Jean Genet (22)

Birth:	19th December, 1910
Death:	15th April, 1986
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Novelist, Playwright, Screenwriter

About

Jean Genet was born in Paris, France. He was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, screenwriter and political activist. He wrote several novels include: Our Lady of the Flowers, The Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle of Brest, and The Thief's Journal. Prisoner of Love, published in 1986, after Genet's death, is a memoir of his encounters with Palestinian fighters and Black Panthers. He wrote several plays include: The Maids, Deathwatch, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens. He wrote several films include: A Song of Love(also director), The Balcony, Deathwatch, The Maids, and Poor Pretty Eddie.

Related Authors

• Jean Paul
• David Storey
• Jean Rhys
• Alfred de Vigny
• Joel C. Rosenberg
• Julien Green
• Laura Malone Elliott
• Nellie Bly
• Lynne Reid Banks
• Oren Arnold

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 21st March

Births

• 1980 - Deryck Whibley
• 1923 - Nizar Qabbani
• 1937 - Tom Flores
• 1956 - Teresa Nielsen Hayden
• 1962 - Rosie O'Donnell

Deaths

• 1924 - Samuel Ullman
• 1916 - Cole Younger
• 1843 - Robert Southey
• 2008 - Shusha Guppy