Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.
JEAN GENETThere is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
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 -
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET -
I decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENET -
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET -
It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENET -
Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn’t had an audience, and lines to speak?
JEAN GENET -
Love makes use of the worst traps. The least noble. The rarest. It exploits coincidence.
JEAN GENET -
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 -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
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 -
On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
JEAN GENET -
When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death.
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 -
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