My 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 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 GENETEvery 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 GENETI give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.
JEAN GENETPerhaps 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 GENETTo achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.
JEAN GENETOne can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.
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 GENETThe vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.
JEAN GENETAnyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
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 GENETViolence is a calm that disturbs you.
JEAN GENETBetrayal is beautiful.
JEAN GENETA man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.
JEAN GENETThere are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.
JEAN GENETOn him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.
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 GENET