Beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENETBeauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.
JEAN GENETI decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENETWhen 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 GENETPoetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENETAdded to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.
JEAN GENETBetrayal is beautiful.
JEAN GENETThough they may not always be handsome men doomed to evil posses the manly virtues.
JEAN GENETViolence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENETSlowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.
JEAN GENETWhat we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.
JEAN GENETBy stretching language we’ll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
JEAN GENETThere is a close relationship between flowers and convicts.
JEAN GENETIt’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
JEAN GENETRepudiating 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 GENETWhat 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 GENETBeauty 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 GENET