Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.
JEAN GENETBeauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
More Jean Genet Quotes
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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 -
Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.
JEAN GENET -
If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.
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 -
Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
JEAN GENET -
Though they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENET -
It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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 -
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 -
Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.
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 -
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 -
The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENET -
What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENET -
Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.
JEAN GENET






