Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.
JEAN GENETPoetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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 -
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 -
Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENET -
The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.
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 fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
JEAN GENET -
I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty – a sunken beauty.
JEAN GENET -
There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENET -
The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.
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 -
Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
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 -
The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
JEAN GENET -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET -
I don’t want to disappear.
JEAN GENET






