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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.

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.

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

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

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

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

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

...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.

Ah those knock-out body fluids: blood, sperm, tears!

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.

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

Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.

She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call "ruined," "fallen," feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody's darlings . . .

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