The pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENETThe pimp has a grin, never a smile.
JEAN GENETI could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.
JEAN GENETThey spent their time doing nothing… they let intimacy fuse them.
JEAN GENETIt’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.
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 GENETIf 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 GENETIt’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.
JEAN GENETAnyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity.
JEAN GENETViolence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENETPoetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.
JEAN GENETThe 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 GENETThere is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.
JEAN GENETPrisons! 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 GENETI decided to be what crime made of me.
JEAN GENETMy heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught.
JEAN GENETThe time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.
JEAN GENET