Jean Genet Quotes

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

I have all but killed myself for Photography. My passion for it is greater than ever. It's forty years that I have fought its fight... I am not fighting to make a 'name' for myself. Maybe you have some feeling for what the fight is for. It's a world's fight... All that's born of spirit seems mad in these days of materialism run riot.

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.

I didn't do anything for two years but work on 'Gone Baby Gone,' and it was miserable and hard, but at the end? It is a good movie. I liked it very much. If it had been dismissed and deemed worthless, it would been definitely devastating. But that didn't happen.

I think that every artistic venture is a risk, and it has to be that way, so you do as much preparation as you can and make that as thorough as you can possibly make it, until you turn up on set. It's about taking risks, and some might work and some might not, but that's what makes it interesting.

I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

Daring to make films of any kind and thus invite the possibility of ridicule was an internal battle of mine for many years as I worked on the screenplay for what would become 'Dear White People' beginning at the end of George W. Bush's second term.

If you stick in the business of being creative, you get hurt. And creative disappointment seems so much harder to take than any other kind. But if you're not prepared to get hurt like that, life can be pretty boring. I think I'm going to keep on going.

The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

It is no more easy to make a good picture than it is to find a diamond or a pearl. It means trouble and you risk your life for it.

I put everything I can into a record. That's what art is for. I take a risk every time I do one with my whole being.

If I can get it down on paper without puking all over the word processor, then as far as I'm concerned, it's fit to see the light of day.

I know I am making the choice most dangerous to an artist in valuing life above art.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

Painting is like having a bad mistress who spends and spends and it's never enough ... I tell myself that even if a tolerable study comes out of it from time to time, it would have been cheaper to buy it from somebody else.

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

Let me point out, if it has escaped your notice, that what an artist does, is fail.

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

People used to envy me my inspiration. I hate inspiration. It takes you over completely. I could never wait until it passed and I got rid of it.

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice.